When Lorenzo de’ Medici consented to assume the “position” occupied by his father Piero and his grandfather Cosmo, he was not the raw youth his immature years would lead one to suppose.  Although intellectual maturity is reached at an earlier age in the sunny South than in the fog-haunted lands of Northern Europe, Lorenzo had enjoyed a long apprenticeship before being called to undertake the duties devolving on him as the uncrowned king of Florence.  From his thirteenth year he had been the companion and shared the counsels, first of his grandfather and father, and subsequently of his father alone.  From the former especially he learned many important lessons in statecraft.  The matter is open to question, however, if any advice had more far-reaching results or was laid more carefully to heart than this which is contained in more than one of Cosmo’s letters:  “Never stint your favors to the cause of learning, and cultivate sedulously the friendship of scholars and humanists.”  Toward such a course Lorenzo’s inclinations, as well as his interests, pointed, and during his life Florence was the Athens not only of Italy but of Europe as a whole.  Here, among many others, were to be found such “epoch-makers” as Poliziano, Ficino, and Landino, Pico della Mirandola, Leo Battista Alberti, Michelangelo, Luigi Pulci—­men who glorified their age by crowning it with the nimbus of their genius.

The literary and artistic greatness of Florence was not due, however, to the comparative intellectual poverty of the other states in Italy.  Florence was only primus inter pares—­greatest among many that were great.  When the fact is recalled that such contemporaries as Pomponius Laetus, Bartolommeo Sacchi, Molza, Alessandro Farnese (Paul III), Platina, Sabellicus at Rome; Pontanus, Sannazaro, and Porcello in Naples; and Pomponasso and Boiardo at Ferrara, were then at or nearing their prime, the position of Florence as the acknowledged centre of European culture was conceded by sense of right alone.  Than this nothing proves more emphatically the strides learning had been making.  It was no longer the prerogative of the few, but the privilege of the many.  From the first, Lorenzo recognized what a strong card he held in the affection and respect of the Italian as well as of the Florentine humanists.

The great secret of Lorenzo’s preeminence in European and Italian, as well as in Tuscan, politics lies in the fact that he was able to unite the sources of administrative, legislative, and judicial power in himself.  All the public offices in Florence were held by his dependents, and so entirely was the state machinery controlled by him that we find such men as Louis XI and the emperor Maximilian, Alfonso of Naples, and Pope Innocent VIII recognizing his authority and appealing to him personally, in place of to the seigniory, to effect the ends they desired.  Such power enabled him to avoid the risks his grandfather Cosmo had been compelled to run to maintain his authority.  The Medicean faction was better in hand than in his grandfather’s days, and Lorenzo, therefore, in playing the role of the peacemaker of Italy, at the time when he held the “balance of power” through his treaties with Milan, Naples, and Ferrara, could speak with a decision that carried weight when he found it necessary to threaten a restless “despot” with a political combination that might depose him.