A murder plot inside Florence Cathedral that made the Medici stronger
On a Sunday in April 1478, assassins struck at Lorenzo de' Medici and his brother Giuliano during High Mass in the Duomo. Giuliano died, Lorenzo escaped to the sacristy, and the city refused to rise. The plotters, the Pazzi banking family, ended up erased from Florence's streets and registers.
The quarrel began with money and church offices. Sixtus IV, elected pope in 1471, lavished bishoprics and titles on his nephews. For Girolamo Riario, possibly his son, he wanted Imola, a small Romagna town on the trade road between Florence and Venice. Lorenzo had agreed in May 1473 to buy it from the Duke of Milan, but the duke sold it to the pope instead. When Lorenzo declined to bankroll the purchase, Sixtus dropped the Medici as papal bankers, and the rival Pazzi bank supplied much of the cash.
A second irritant was Pisa. Sixtus named Francesco Salviati, a friend and kinsman of Francesco de' Pazzi, as its archbishop without Florentine consent. Riario, Salviati and Francesco de' Pazzi then sought the pope's blessing to remove the brothers. Sixtus wanted the Medici gone but said he would not sanction killing. A coded letter in the Ubaldini family archive, cracked in 2004, shows that Federico da Montefeltro had promised 600 soldiers waiting outside the city.
The attack on 26 April failed in its central aim. Bernardo Bandini dei Baroncelli and Francesco de' Pazzi killed Giuliano, while Salviati tried and failed to seize the Palazzo della Signoria. Reprisals were swift: some eighty people were executed by 20 October 1478, several hanged from the Signoria's windows. Bandini fled as far as Constantinople, where Sultan Mehmed II had him arrested and sent back. Lorenzo did protect the pope's young nephew, Cardinal Raffaele Riario, whom he judged an innocent pawn.
The family's name and dolphin coat of arms were struck out everywhere, and anyone called Pazzi had to take another surname. Sixtus answered by excommunicating Lorenzo and placing Florence under interdict, and troops from Naples and Urbino raided its lands. Lorenzo gambled by sailing to Naples to place himself in King Ferdinand I's hands. The crisis persuaded Medici loyalists to concentrate power further, and the poet Poliziano, who had been in the cathedral, wrote a vivid account of the day.
Source: Pazzi conspiracy
