572. The Medici: Masters of Florence (Part 1)

26:15They clearly think, no, we want to get rid of these rivals before they become too big. They haven't bought their own furniture. Exactly, exactly. The Albizzi have inherited their furniture and the Medici are commissioning kind of fancy furniture from artists. their leader is a guy called Ronaldo Diadici and he is a kind of grizzled you know he'd be Sean Bean probably oh well that doesn't promise well for his fate no exactly he's kind of grizzled he's a former soldier he's very haughty he's very proud and he says the Medici are absolute scum I can't stand the Medici and he actually gives a brilliant speech in 1426 to his supporters which is reported in one of the chronicles and he says we are well born yet now we We find ourselves companions in the government with men from the Mugello, from the hills.

27:02Those who were once our household servants, they treat us as servants while they themselves behave like lords. Shocking. And he says to his supporters, let us make sure that men of the right background end up in government and that these upstarts return to their pitiful trades and focus on providing food for their family tables. And actually, Tom, that reminds me of how you talk about other podcasters.

27:30the tone of hatred and condescension. I don't know what you're talking about. So on that note, let's move to the cliffhanger. Months after Giovanni has died, there is a bit of a crisis. The Albizzi are very keen on the little war to bolster their prestige, Ronaldo in particular. And the war they want is against the neighbouring city-state of Lucca. Cosimo thinks this is a very bad idea. He says, listen, we can't win because Lucca is supported by Milan, which is a kind of regional superpower. and let's not get tangled up with the Milanese. But the vote goes against him. The Albitzi get their way.

28:03The war starts. So Kelsa breeze, it goes really badly for Florence. Florence starts running out of money. So this is great news for Cosimo. He lends money to the Florentine government at 33 % interest. So he's put up all this money. He's been proved right. And he's making loads of cash from the interest payments. And the Albitzi are absolutely furious. This has gone very badly. And by 1433, Tom, I hate to say it, but storm clouds are gathering over the Tuscan hills. Over Florence. Over Florence, exactly. There's lots of murmurs on the streets. You know, there's clearly going to be a showdown between the Albizzi and the Medici.

28:40And the Albizzi are spreading rumours. Cosimo is planning to seize power and he has to be stopped. One night, it is said, he comes home and he finds the doors of his palazzo smeared with blood. So he knows that something is coming. at the end of May 1433 he starts basically sending money away he lodges 8 000 florins with the Dominican monks at San Marco a monastery that we'll be talking about a lot in this series he sends the rest of his money to the Medici banks in Rome and Naples and later that summer he moves his family out of the city as well to their country estate in the Mugello and he takes them there.

29:19But while he is away, Rinaldo de Albitzi has been fixing the coming signoria elections. So the end of August, the elections take place and they're a huge blow for the Medici. Seven out of nine of the people who are elected are Albitzi loyalists. And the standard bearer, the gonfalonieri, is a bloke whose debts Rinaldo has just paid off. So this is looking very bleak. on the 1st of September this new council the Signoria take office and the next day a message arrives at Cosimo's country estate in the Mugello saying you must return to the city we need your help making some important decisions and he thinks oh no now he could flee but if he flees he will lose everything he could be declared a traitor and his property confiscated or something So he thinks, no, I've got to face the music.

30:14And on the 7th of September, he comes into the city. He goes straight to the Signoria, and he finds that the council session has already started. And the captain of the guard leads him in. He leads him up the stairs, and they get up to the council chamber, but the doors are firmly shut, and the guard says, keep walking. And they go up, up, and the captain leads him past, and he shows him into a small cell. and then the captain says, you are under arrest on good grounds, as will soon be very clear. And then he slams the door, Tom. He locks it shut. And on that incredible bombshell, I think we should take a break.

30:52I think we should. Can't stand the tension otherwise.

30:59Hello, everyone. Welcome back to The Rest is History. And Dominic, you left us on an absolute cliffhanger. Cosimo de' Medici loves his Tacitus loves the high interest rate loves a Circassian slave girl he's gone to the Palazzo della Signoria and there shock horror he's been locked up in a cell so what's going on how's he going to get out of this well two days go by Tom and he's sitting there in his cell and then on the morning of the 9th of September he hears the great bell the vacca tolling overhead surely mooing overhead mooing I believe is the word yeah And this is summoning the citizens of Florence to this emergency mass meeting, a parlamento that I talked about in the first half.

31:42But as the people sort of flood towards the square, there are armed Albizzi loyalists guarding the entrances. They turn away anybody who's suspected of being a Medici supporter. So this crowd assembles and the councillors ask approval. They say, can we have an emergency committee, a balia, to reform the city for the good of the people? So in other words, what they're carrying out is an anti-Medici coup. and this Baliat formally charges Cosimo with high treason. They say, ironically, given that he'd been against the war, they say, you've been prolonging the war with Lucca to charge high interest rates and to line your own pockets.

32:17And is that accurate? Well, you know what? They had loads of witnesses. The witnesses had been tortured on the rack, so the witnesses were slightly unreliable. That said, I think a lot of modern historians say he probably had been prolonging the war to charge high interest. So, yeah, I mean, listeners can make up their own minds. Ronaldo Di Albizi says, all right, let's have the death penalty on this bloke. But actually, he now starts to find things very difficult. First of all, the Medici bank has so many kind of tentacles, as it were, everywhere, that foreign opinion is very much on the Medici side.

32:50So the Venetians, for example, sent envoys and say, can we have Cosme release, please? The standard bearer, who was meant to be an Albizi loyalist, he actually takes a bribe from the Medici and says, oh, I'm actually very ill, I can't take part in the decision at all. He seems magnificently corrupt. Yeah, he's incredibly corrupt. Taking bongs from everybody, left, right and centre. And also the Abizzi are not sufficiently ruthless. They haven't arrested the other members of the Medici family. So Cosimo's cousin, Avarado, his brother, Lorenzo, other kind of Medici bigwigs are kind of supposed to be raising mercenaries outside the city.

33:24And so people are very anxious about that. So that definitely loses in points on the Sandbrook scale of effective political operators then. He's a bodger. He's made a mess of this. He had his chance and he's blown it because basically when the Balliard hands down its verdict, Cosimo is not executed. He's banished to Padua for 10 years. And Cosimo is brought in to hear the sentence and gives this incredibly disingenuous speech in which he says, you know, I'm very happy to be exiled because I know it's for the good of Florence. I leave my heart and soul with you, he says. My troubles will be easy to bear as I know that my adversity will bring peace and happiness to the city.

34:02Well, you know who he's echoing there is Cicero, who was the great model for Italian humanists, who was exiled by his rival and then makes a triumphant return. And I imagine that with that speech, Cosimo is channeling Cicero and everybody knows he's channeling Cicero. So by saying that, he's basically saying, I will be back. Yeah, and remember, he had Cicero in his library. So he's very familiar with all this kind of stuff. But I think his listeners would be familiar as well, just because Cicero is such a massive figure in the imagination of the time. They've all had this kind of humanist education.

34:38So they're all really into this stuff. Off he goes into exile and it's like a triumphant progress. He's greeted an honoured guest wherever he goes. He doesn't actually go to Padua. He goes to Venice and he's treated as a VIP and he's put up in the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore. You know, he lives like a prince. It's all great. So Ronaldo must be thrilled about this. He's raging. He's back in Florence. And he says to all his supporters, look, we have made a terrible mess of this. We've got the worst of all worlds. We've struck at the Medici family, but we haven't finished them off. Scotch the snake, not killed it.

35:10Exactly. And actually, they continue to do this. So over the winter, they should have rolled up the Medici network. They should have won over Medici clients in Venice and Rome. They should have done all this. They should have started killing people, but they didn't. That's so soundbrew. They should have started killing people. Well, they absolutely should. Listen, if you're not going to do it properly, don't play the game at all. That's my verdict. Yeah, yeah, I'm hearing you. So anyway, momentum kind of leeches away from the Albizzi. And in the late summer of 1434, there's a Medici majority in the Signore elections.

35:46Ronaldo says, okay, now is the time for an armed coup. Enough of this messing around. But again, the Albizzi allies are like, no, I don't like the thought of an armed coup. We don't like that kind of thing. And eventually the Signoria, they summon back Cosimo and they say to Ronaldo, and literally the story of the previous year reversed, and they say to Ronaldo, come and meet us at the palace for an urgent, important meeting. Ronaldo realises, okay, they're going to throw me into prison. So actually he doesn't repeat Cosimo's mistake. He goes back to his house. He says to his guards, secure the city.

36:22Go out into the city. And he calls in loads of mercenaries from outside Florence. but over the next few days his support melts away. It's pretty obvious that the pro-Medici council, the Signoria, have made preparations of their own. They've got troops of their own. Now, as it happens, the bloke who sorts all this out is the Pope because he's also in Florence. Wow, that's a turn up for the books. So he's Eugenius IV and he's been kicked out of Rome by a mob and he's basically lodging in a monastery in Santa Maria Novella in the centre of Florence. and he needs money to get back to Rome. Who are you going to ask?

36:58Yeah, you're going to ask the Medici bank. He says, look, I'll act as a mediator on this. He says to Ronaldo, I don't think you can win. I think you should surrender and I will try to persuade the Medici to be lenient with you. So by the end of September, the struggle is over. The Signoria recall Cosimo to Florence. He makes this great progress through the countryside. There are crowds along the roads. Then on the 6th of October, he enters Florence in triumph, even bigger crowds, greet him as a hero, chanting his name and stuff. However, I will say there are two sides to this story. The city has been secured beforehand by hundreds of Medici soldiers.

37:38So the crowds are not exactly under duress, but there is a degree of intimidation. Basically, if you're not a Medici supporter, you keep very quiet during this period. So you could argue it's a genuine upsurge of kind of popular affection, or you could say this is an intimidated population after what's basically a military coup. And Cosimo, see, this is why I like Cosimo. He's a serious person, Tom. He does what has to be done. He doesn't kill a lot of people, but he is ruthless. He just says, right, now we have to dismantle the Albizzi network completely. We kicked them out of Florence forever So the whole clan are banished from Florence And does that last?

38:20Does that stick? Yeah, it works So he's then elected Gonfalonieri Standard bearer of the Signoria He only does it for two months But it's just a little symbol You know, I am the top man I'm the top dog now So actually he's now moved from being Cicero to Caesar Augustus Yes, and actually this is a comparison that was on my mind the whole time Basically, Cosimo is going to control Florence now for the next 30 years. And I would say he is one of the most impressive politicians that we've had on this podcast. And we've done however many hundred episodes. But he really stands out for me. And the Augustus comparison is exactly the one that was on my mind.

38:58So like Augustus, he keeps the existing system, the Republican system. The difference is that now when you pull a name out of the leather bag, it is certain to have been pre-approved, to have been chosen by Cosimo and his allies. Now, there's always, as you said, there has always been bribery. There's always been patronage and whatnot. But they are doing it in a really systematic, ruthless way. Now, if you step out of line, you won't be killed. But you might find yourself with an unexpectedly large tax bill. Or you won't get planning permission for your new palazzo or whatever. Or at worst, you'll be banished and your property confiscated.

39:37foreigners always describe cosimo as the lord of the city as the master of the city but he doesn't often hold public office in fact he very rarely holds it again it's his clients and surrogates who hold public office and he's kind of in the shadows the whole time and your augustus comparison donald weinstein on his book on this period says cosimo liked to be seen as a benevolent father figure who embodied the traditional florentine virtues of the pious christian the shrewd pragmatic merchant and the republic loving patriot in other words he's a kindly father figure he's the first citizen he's not a prince he's not a king or an emperor or anything like that but he's just primus inter pares so and i'm sure the augustus comparison would have played on his mind and he's basically copying from the playbook yeah of course i'm sure he's not kind of doing it an antiquarian way i mean it clearly gels with his character but he must be thinking all the time well you know i have president here exactly now there are sometimes protests there's a one incident in particular in 1458 there's a lot of protests about election rigging and just how much money cosmo is making from lending money to the government and you know he does what needs to be done cuts it off before it can gather momentum he actually says people are protesting about election rigging.

40:59Well, fine, I'll double down. And he calls a big parliamento. He calls in loads of troops from Milan to police the streets. And so when people assemble to decide on what they want to do with it, they want to change the constitution, the place is lined with his armed men. He gets his way. He gets given full legal control of the electoral process, and he will never, ever be challenged again. So again, he's just done what needs to be done and got his way. And I mentioned he's brought in lots of troops. He's brought in troops from Milan. Why Milan? And this brings us to his other big success story, which is his foreign policy.

41:36So his father, Giovanni, had bet on that bloke who became, if only temporarily, Pope and slept with 200 women in seven years. And that had really worked out. And Cosimo places a similar bet in a big Milanese succession crisis. So Milan is eclipsed by Florence, I think, in the popular imagination now. sort of 14th, 15th century. But Milan was a massive power broker in the Italian landscape. It's rivaled really only by Venice. And Milan had always been one of Florence's rivals, but Cosimo wants to have a little diplomatic revolution and ally with Milan. So for 200 years, Milan had been ruled by the Visconti family.

42:17And the current Duke of Milan is a man called Filippo Maria Visconti. And he is a tremendous character. I'm going to read you what Christopher Hibbert writes about him. he'd been known on summer days to strip the rich clothes from his grotesquely fat and dirty body and roll about naked in his garden he was so ugly he refused to have his portrait painted so nervous he screamed at the sight of a naked sword so frightened of thunder that he had a soundproof room built in his palace and my favorite thing is we love a prankster and a practical joker we do yeah so he would often talk to a courtier and then unexpectedly he would produce a snake out of his sleeve, which I think would be terrifying.

42:57Presumably he's doing that because the serpent is the emblem of the Visconti, isn't it? It's on its kind of coat of arms, the great viper. Yeah, but what a great trick to have a viper stuffed in your clothing to pull them out at a moment's notice. The one downside with this guy, Filippo Maria Visconti, he's not a great husband. So he had two wives. One of them he just had her executed. And the second one, on their wedding night, He heard a dog howling in the background. And he said, oh my God, that's a terrible sign. This woman's obviously dreadful. Get rid. And he immediately had her locked up.

43:31Not many children then. So no legitimate heir. Now he has an illegitimate daughter and she marries a bloke, another great character actually, called Count Francesco Sforza. This bloke, Sforza, his father had been an illiterate peasant who founded his own mercenary company, one of the best companies in Italy. Sforza inherited it And he is regarded as the absolute, if you like mercenary captains, he's number one. He can bend metal bars with his bare hands, Tom, like Augustus the Strong. But he doesn't throw foxes in the air. He doesn't throw foxes in the air. No, he's got better things to do. He wants to win the government of Milan.

44:06So there's an immensely complicated Milanese succession crisis. And Cosimo decides this bloke, Schwarzer, bar bending, mercenary captain, he is the man. He lends him loads of money. He gives him an unprecedented overdraft facility, 3 ,000 ducats. And armed with this amazing overdraft facility, he ends up getting control of Milan. So now there is a formal alliance between Cosimo's Florence and Sforza's Milan. And this means that basically the Medici, they're not exactly invulnerable, but if anybody attacks them, they can call on the most powerful city in northern Italy. So Cosimo has the cash and Sforza has the manpower.

44:51Yeah. And as long as they're in cahoots, no one can really bring down either one of them. Exactly right. And the interesting thing actually is that a lesser man than Cosimo would have tried to take the opportunity to expand Florence's territory and to expand kind of Florence's empire. But he's really smart. He knows that Florence can't really support a larger empire. It's not a big enough city. So his priority is basically he wants peace because he just wants to make money. You know, he will use the Milanese troops to protect what we have. And in the meantime, I'll just lend people money at 33 % interest and we'll become richer and richer.

45:26And, of course, create great masterpieces of Renaissance art. Exactly. But I think this point about money is actually really important because Cosimo is much less famous than his grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent. But, Tom, I believe him to be the greater man because he never loses sight of what matters, which is the balance sheet. He doesn't showboat, does he? He doesn't showboat. He doesn't. He's all about the bank. So he expands the bank across Europe. So there are representatives, I mean, the list of cities, London, Naples, Cologne, Geneva, Lyon, Basel, Avignon, Bruges, Antwerp, Nubec, Ancona, Bologna, Rome, Pisa, Venice.

46:03There are Medici representatives, Medici branch offices everywhere. And they can source relics, silk, manuscripts, choir boys, you name it, they can deliver it. And as a result, they are making enormous amounts of money. So I think one estimate, in 10 years after 1442, they make almost 190 ,000 florins in profit. And this is probably an underestimate because they are also fiddling books because they don't want people to know how much money they are making. However, as you will know, there is a hidden cost to making all this money. And that is the future of his eternal soul. Yeah, it's that God hates you and you will burn in hell, which is unfortunate because this is the great problem with banking.

46:51as the Bible explicitly says, if you charge interest, if you're guilty of usury, you're a very bad person indeed. So you might think, how do they get away with it? I mean, there are various kind of fudges. It's often pretended that people will pretend that the interest is a gift. Oh, we're not really charging interest. It just so happens that the borrower has given us this lovely present at the end of the loan. I don't think God is going to accept that. Well, would God accept this? could you disguise the interest payments as a travel-ex style commission fee on changing ducats into florins or whatever it might be?

47:27I think that's more plausible. Yeah, well, this is what they do with the PayPal accounts because they're using lots of different currencies. I don't think God would have anything against exchange rates. Well, Cosimo was worried that he might because Cosimo was a serious person, Tom, and he is undoubtedly familiar with something like Dante's Divine Comedy. When Dante goes to hell, or the poet in the story, he meets usurers, kind of bankers, and they're weighed down by these bags of gold around their necks and they're trapped in kind of burning, scorching sand. No one wants that to happen to them.

47:58No, not for eternity. No. I mean, not even for a few seconds, really. I wouldn't want that for any period of time. So how do you deal with that? How do you cope? Well, here is an example. Again, something that will very much appeal to you, Tom. In 1439, Cosimo plays a key part in hosting in Florence an ecumenical council of the Western and Eastern churches. Oh, yes, an ecumenical council. Yes. Get in. There are people sobbing with joy listening to this podcast. You know, basically all over your own household. No, not even my own household. Oh, really? Just you? Just me. So Cosimo personally welcomes Pope Eugenius IV, the bloke who negotiated that deal, the Patriarch of Constantinople, pitches up in Florence, and the Emperor of the East, to the emperor in Constantinople, John Paliologos.

48:46And actually the result of this council is a very short-lived and abortive deal, a union between the churches of Rome and Constantinople, between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The reason for that being that the Turks are closing in on Constantinople and the emperor is desperate for Latin help. Yeah, exactly. For Cosimo, all this is absolutely brilliant. Because basically, to put this up, it's like hosting in the World Cup or the Eurovision Song Contest or something. Florence can't really afford it. So basically, he has to lend the city, his own city, loads of money, and he takes home 14 ,000 Florence in interest.

49:22It's worked out splendidly for him. So I think this is a perfect example of the fusion of politics, finance, of religious faith and culture that powers the Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance. So first of all, all of these scholars from Constantinople, they have turned up with loads of Greek manuscripts that they're going to quote from in these debates. So their bags are kind of bulging with manuscript rolls or whatever. This is when Plato really gets reintroduced. It's Plethon, this guy who actually, he doesn't even approve of Christianity. He wants to go back to worshipping the ancient gods.

49:56And he brings Plato in Greek and he sets up a school there. And this is where Plato really becomes part of the bloodstream of the Renaissance. People become very excited about Plato in Florence. They're like, oh, wow, this is amazing, all this stuff. and actually some of these manuscripts end up in Cosimo's library I think he probably they're given as presents or he buys them or who knows but they basically end up there so he's got all the manuscripts we know he loves all these books we know he's into all this stuff but also the money that he's taken home in profits he uses that money to launder his immortal soul so he commissions as a result of this council a new fresco in the sacristy of the Basilica of San Lorenzo the church where the Medici are buried and you can see it today you know it's one of the many tourist attractions that are associated with cosimo and his family and this is textbook italian renaissance patron behavior because the church is telling them all the time listen you're making a lot of money in interest payments in usury but it's actually fine because if you spend a lot of that on charitable works on arms or even better if you invest it in monasteries and church buildings then god will probably forgive you and it'll all be all right do you think god likes art i think god loves this because obviously the church know exactly what god wants don't they i can't believe you would question that tom they have a hotline to god and the pope in particularly he knows exactly what god wants and he knows that god wants a lovely fresco or a nice statue or something of that elk yeah of course so cosmo's father giovanni he had hired brunelleschi the dome of the cathedral man to redo the Medici Church of San Lorenzo.

51:40Cosimo himself spends more money on San Lorenzo. He spends money on the baptistry of the cathedral. If you go to Florence and you go to a sort of three-day itinerary, a lot of the churches you will visit, or San Michele, Santa Croce, Santa Maria delle Angeli, like all the classic tourist sites, these are places that Cosimo has spent money on. And the one place above all, which will play a big part in this series, is the Dominican Monastery at San Marco. And here, at one point, Cosimo said to the Pope, I'm actually genuinely quite worried about this burning sand. I'd love to get out of that somehow.

52:14And the Pope said, well, that monastery is the place. Really invest in that monastery. Cosimo spent 30 ,000 florins, completely renovating it. New church, new refectory for the monks, new library with hundreds of rare manuscripts. I mean, it's a very impossible question to answer, but in dollars, what would... Oh, in millions. I mean, just if you think about the equivalent cost today of renovating a building like that, the state of the art stuff and then donating a library with the very most up to the minute expensive and rare resources. It's the equivalent of a big donor to an American university or something like that.

52:57It's a super rich donor to an American university laundering their reputation. I mean, it's exactly what it is. So that's got to keep the burning sand at bay. Yeah, I think so. So actually, rather like an American donor will have their name on the Tom Holland Library at the University of Arizona. Pope Eugenius IV gives Cosimo a bull of expiation, which is basically like a pardon for sins. Cosimo has it put up above the door of the sacristy. So to remind everybody, I've paid for this, and as a result, I'm free of sin. Brilliant. He very famously gets a friar there called Fra Angelico, to paint kind of mystical frescoes in every monk's cell.

53:36And if you go to Florence and you go and see, I mean, these are some of the most amazing of all the artistic sites you will see in Florence. And actually, we'll come back to this monastery because this monastery ends up being the power base of Girolamo Savonarola later in the series. But obviously, art's not just about your soul. It's also about your status. Great example is the Palazzo Medici. They got an architect called Michelotto to do this in the 1440s. And this is another sort of temple to Renaissance art that Cosimo had made. It's a cross between, if you go to it today, it's a cross between a kind of Gothic fortress and a classical palace.

54:13So it has kind of Doric and Corinthian columns, very Renaissance. And then if you went in under the arcades, again, very Renaissance under the arcades, there would be classical busts, there'd be loads of artworks, and particularly two of the most famous of all Renaissance artworks, made by one of Cosimo's absolute favorites, who's a man called Donatello, a sculptor. And these are both on biblical themes. So there's David, the Old Testament hero. And he's kind of very young and kind of slightly girlish looking in that one, isn't he? So not like the Michelangelo one. No. And the other is Judith and Holofernes.

54:50They're biblical themes, but the style is classical. And the David is the first freestanding nude male sculpture since antiquity. so it's both retro and very and very modern cutting edge cutting edge because it's made from bronze and bronze casting was so expensive that only the really really super rich would afford to pay for it so it really is the kind of bauble that a kind of an elon musk or a jeff bezos or whoever there's somebody of that ilk so there's donatello and the other big artist associated with this building is the painter. He's a great character, actually. He's the friar, Filippo Lippi.

55:34So he's a friar, but he's also just an absolutely obsessive leccer. So Filippo Lippi will be doing his artworks or whatever, and he's sitting there. And then he's suddenly, oh, I've got to go. He's overcome by lust, and he has to leave. This happens all the time. And Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the Great Artist, says that basically eventually Cosimo had to lock him in his room and say, look, come on, sort yourself out. Like, finish the painting. Cut off his internet connection. Right, but Lippi was so obsessed. He cut up his own bed sheets and made the rope so that he'd climb out to go and visit a prostitute because he was so overcome by lust.

56:10And this is a friar. I mean, come on, you can't tell me that Thomas Cromwell wasn't onto something, Tom. Anyway, so the Palazzo Medici is not finished until the 1480s. But by that point, Cosimo is long dead. So in the 1450s, so by that point, what is he? 60s. His health had entered a decline, and this will be a great theme of this series. And this is gout. We love a bit of gout in the show. I think there were two great ages of gout. So one of them is Medici Florence, and the other is kind of 18th century British gentlemen's gloves. And this is one of them. Cosimo has terrible gout, and he has to be carried everywhere.

56:45And he basically says to his sons, Piero and Giovanni, look, you guys are going to have to manage this, the Medici interest. Piero, you do the politics. fix Giovanni Udo the Bank. Unfortunately, they also have horrendous gout. So this one day when a bloke turned up at the Palazzo Medici to meet Cosimo and he found them all lying in bed, presumably together, all groaning with their gout, which was obviously a ludicrous scene. They might bump into one another and that's unbearably painful if you have gout. In bed? I think they're probably lying very rigidly. I don't know. I don't know how you lie in gout.

57:23You don't want to share a bed with someone if you've got gout. I don't think. No, I wouldn't anyway. Well, gout is a serious business now. I don't know. We shouldn't be laughing about it. We're punching down, Tom. Paul. I'm not laughing. I'm being sympathetic. Giovanni, he died very young. Well, quite young. He died at 42 with his gout. Some historians say because of kidney failure, gout related. Others say he was unbelievably fat and he probably had a heart attack. Anyway, either way, he's dead. Giovanni was Cosimo's favourite. and he's very depressed to this and never really recovers. And actually, just under a year later, in August 1464, Cosimo died, probably of gout-related kidney failure.

58:05And he had a big funeral. He was buried in the Medici Church at San Lorenzo and the Signore gave him the title, Pata Patriae, father of his country. And Tom, you will know who had this before. Cicero had it and Augustus had it. Exactly, exactly. And it's the title, the words are inscribed on his tomb. And of course, being a fan of Cicero and of Augustus, he would have absolutely loved it. Do you think it would have consoled him as he stood in the burning sand? No. You, again, you're displaying your irreligiosity because the Pope has explicitly said that God loved a fresco and that God loved all this stuff.

58:46So there's no burning sand. That's not in the equation. So Cosimo is now dead. but where does this leave the Medici and where does it leave Florence? Well, I will give the last word to one of his opponents who's a patrician called Marco Parenti and he said after Cosimo's death it said not for many years had Florence been so prosperous but on his death everyone rejoiced such was their love and desire for liberty it appeared to the Florentines that Cosimo's style of government had brought them to subjection and servitude and from this they believed that his death would liberate them. But Dominic, will it?

59:23And I guess that in the next episode, we will be finding out and we will be exploring the life and times of the most celebrated, the most glittering, in fact, the most bloodstained of all the Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent. Is that right? Yes, I can't wait. And do you know what? Not only can I not wait, but I'm guessing a lot of the listeners can't wait. And is there any way, Tom, that Renaissance men and women could hear that now? Absolutely there is Dominic because like the Medici we have set up a very convenient banking system at restishistory.com where people can hear that episode and the next two episodes so three episodes of unbelievable value.

1:00:03Yeah and it's important to say God wants you to do it and you will not go to hell if you join the Rest is History Club. That is the most important thing to emphasize. Make God happy. Yeah unbelievable value and on that note thank you Dominic. and ciao ciao