XXI

During the ten years which elapsed between 1502 and 1512, Piero Soderini administered Florence with an outward show of great prosperity.  He regained Pisa, and maintained an honourable foreign policy in the midst of the wars stirred up by the League of Cambray.  Meanwhile the young princes of the House of Medici had grown to manhood in exile.  The Cardinal Giovanni was thirty-seven in 1512.  His brother Giuliano was thirty-three.  Both of these men were better fitted than their brother Piero to fight the battles of the family.  Giovanni, in particular, had inherited no small portion of the Medicean craft.  During the troubled reign of Julius II. he kept very quiet, cementing his connections with powerful men in Rome, but making no effort to regain his hold on Florence.  Now the moment for striking a decisive blow had come.  After the battle of Ravenna in 1512, the French were driven out of Italy, and the Sforzas returned to Milan; the Spanish troops, under the Viceroy Cardona, remained masters of the country.  Following the camp of these Spaniards, Giovanni de’ Medici entered Tuscany in August, and caused the restoration of the Medici to be announced in Florence.  The people, assembled by Soderini, resolved to resist to the uttermost.  No foreign army should force them to receive the masters whom they had expelled.  Yet their courage failed on August 29th, when news reached them of the capture and the sack of Prato.  Prato is a sunny little city a few miles distant from the walls of Florence, famous for the beauty of its women, the richness of its gardens, and the grace of its buildings.  Into this gem of cities the savage soldiery of Spain marched in the bright autumnal weather, and turned the paradise into a hell.  It is even now impossible to read of what they did in Prato without shuddering.[16] Cruelty and lust, sordid greed for gold, and cold delight in bloodshed, could go no further.  Giovanni de’ Medici, by nature mild and voluptuous, averse to violence of all kinds, had to smile approval, while the Spanish Viceroy knocked thus with mailed hand for him at the door of Florence.  The Florentines were paralysed with terror.  They deposed Soderini and received the Medici.  Giovanni and Giuliano entered their devastated palace in the Via Larga, abolished the Grand Council, and dealt with the republic as they listed.

XXII

There was no longer any medium in Florence possible between either tyranny or some such government as the Medici had now destroyed.  The State was too rotten to recover even the modified despotism of Lorenzo’s days.  Each transformation had impaired some portion of its framework, broken down some of its traditions, and sowed new seeds of egotism in citizens who saw all things round them change but self-advantage.  Therefore Giovanni and Giuliano felt themselves secure in flattering the popular vanity by an empty parade