Anxious though the situation was, crucial though many of the problems he had to solve undoubtedly were, yet the statement may be accepted as approximately true that the last three or four years of Lorenzo’s life were spent amid profound peace—­at least as far as Florence was concerned.  Roscoe’s picture is highly colored, but not overcolored: 

“At this period the city of Florence was at its highest degree of prosperity.  The vigilance of Lorenzo had secured it from all apprehensions of external attack; and his acknowledged disinterestedness and moderation had almost extinguished that spirit of dissension for which it had been so long remarkable.  The Florentines gloried in their illustrious citizen, and were gratified by numbering in their body a man who wielded in his hand the fate of nations and attracted the respect and admiration of all Europe; the administration of justice engaged his constant attention, and he carefully avoided giving rise to an idea that he was himself above the control of the law.”

And Guicciardini adds:  “This season of tranquillity was prosperous beyond any that Italy had experienced during the long course of a thousand years.  Abounding in men eminent in the administration of public affairs, skilled in every honorable science and every useful art, it stood high in the estimation of foreign nations; which extraordinary felicity, acquired at many different opportunities, several circumstances contributed to preserve, but among the rest no small share of it was by general consent ascribed to the industry and the virtue of Lorenzo de’ Medici, a citizen who rose so far above the mediocrity of a private station that he regulated by his counsels the affairs of Florence, then more important by its situation, by the genius of its inhabitants, and the promptitude of its resources than by the extent of its dominions, and who, having obtained the implicit confidence of the Roman pontiff Innocent VIII, rendered his name great and his authority important in the affairs of Italy.”

Though he had never allowed the demands of civic affairs to interfere with his interest in the progress of the Renaissance, war-time, as we have said, is not favorable to the cultivation of letters.  While the connection between the states during the course of hostilities undoubtedly promoted the increase of mutual interest in each other’s intellectual development, the fact that the Magnifico had to disburse enormous sums for the prosecution of the campaigns necessarily limited his ability to extend the same princely patronage to the cause of learning.  But with the conclusion of peace he resumed the original scale of his benefactions, and the last four years of his life were, perhaps, the most fruitful of all in sterling good achieved in the fostering of the Renaissance.