The Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478
By N.B. — Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
On a spring morning in Florence, a dagger rose before the Host did. Blood mixed with holy oil. The city of Botticelli and banknotes learned that day the price of power when no oath is sacred, not even before God.
Florence was a city that glittered with art and whispered in poison. Behind its silk-clad façades, power changed hands not through public declarations, but with letters, laced wine, and the thin slice of a blade. In the spring of 1478, one such blade came for Lorenzo de’ Medici.
The Medici were not nobility in the old sense. They were bankers, merchants who had purchased Florence’s soul one patronage at a time. Their enemies were many, none more desperate than the Pazzi, a proud family suffocating beneath Medici control. Where Lorenzo was beloved for his largesse and cunning, the Pazzi were shadows at court, nursing old bloodlines and bitter appetites.
It was in the grand cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore that they chose to strike. A Sunday mass, April 26. The holy air thick with incense, the congregation oblivious. Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano knelt side by side as the choir sang. The assassins moved in like dark currents. Francesco de’ Pazzi himself drove the dagger into Giuliano’s chest, his conspirators falling upon the young man until he lay bleeding at the altar.
Lorenzo, swift and brutal, fought off his attackers and fled into the sacristy. Blood streaked his face, but his will remained intact. By nightfall, Florence knew what had been attempted, and the city rose with the fury of a wounded god.
The retaliation was immediate and merciless. Conspirators were dragged from their homes, some taken straight from the cathedral steps. Francesco de’ Pazzi was hanged from the window of the Palazzo della Signoria, his corpse twisting in the breeze. Archbishop Salviati, who had joined the plot under the guise of piety, met a similar fate.
Pope Sixtus IV, whose complicity remained an open secret, threatened Florence with interdict and war, but Lorenzo, ever the fox, turned to diplomacy, forging alliances that saved the city from ruin.
The Pazzi Conspiracy was not merely a failed assassination. It was a testament to how thin the line between courtly elegance and vicious slaughter could be. Florence wore beauty like a mask, but behind it, ambition gnawed at every thread.
History would remember Lorenzo as il Magnifico. The Pazzi name would decay, remembered only in bloodstained pages and the rusted nails of those gallows.
Sources
- Lauro Martines, April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici. Oxford University Press, 2003.
- Miles J. Unger, Magnifico: The Brilliant Life and Violent Times of Lorenzo de' Medici. Simon & Schuster, 2008.
- Gene Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence. Princeton University Press, 1977.