XVI

The conjuration of the Pazzi was only one in a long series of similar conspiracies.  Italian despots gained their power by violence and wielded it with craft.  Violence and craft were therefore used against them.  When the study of the classics had penetrated the nation with antique ideas of heroism, tyrannicide became a virtue.  Princes were murdered with frightful frequency.  Thus Gian Maria Visconti was put to death at Milan in 1412; Galeazzo Maria Sforza in 1484; the Chiarelli of Fabriano were massacred in 1435; the Baglioni of Perugia in 1500; Girolamo Gentile planned the assassination of Galeazzo Sforza at Genoa in 1476; Niccolo d’Este conspired against his uncle Ercole in 1476; Stefano Porcari attempted the life of Nicholas V. at Rome in 1453; Lodovico Sforza narrowly escaped a violent death in 1453.  I might multiply these instances beyond satiety.  As it is, I have selected but a few examples falling, all but one, within the second half of the fifteenth century.  Nearly all these attempts upon the lives of princes were made in church during the celebration of sacred offices.  There was no superfluity of naughtiness, no wilful sacrilege, in this choice of an occasion.  It only testified to the continual suspicion and guarded watchfulness maintained by tyrants.  To strike at them except in church was almost impossible.  Meanwhile the fate of the tyrannicides was uniform.  Successful or not, they perished.  Yet so grievous was the pressure of Italian despotism, so glorious was the ideal of Greek and Roman heroism, so passionate the temper of the people, that to kill a prince at any cost to self appeared the crown of manliness.  This bloodshed exercised a delirious fascination:  pure and base, personal and patriotic motives combined to add intensity of fixed and fiery purpose to the murderous impulse.  Those then who, like the Medici, aspired to tyranny and sought to found a dynasty of princes, entered the arena against a host of unknown and unseen gladiators.

XVII

On his deathbed, in 1492, Lorenzo lay between two men—­Angelo Poliziano and Girolamo Savonarola.  Poliziano incarnated the genial, radiant, godless spirit of fifteenth-century humanism.  Savonarola represented the conscience of Italy, self-convicted, amid all her greatness, of crimes that called for punishment.  It is said that when Lorenzo asked the monk for absolution, Savonarola bade him first restore freedom to Florence.  Lorenzo, turned his face to the wall and was silent.  How indeed could he make this city in a moment free, after sixty years of slow and systematic corruption?  Savonarola left him, and he died unshriven.  This legend is doubtful, though it rests on excellent if somewhat partial authority.  It has, at any rate, the value of a mythus, since it epitomises the attitude assumed by the great preacher to the prince.  Florence enslaved, the soul of Lorenzo cannot lay its burden down, but must go with all its sins upon it to the throne of God.