to do.  The marriage festa was celebrated in Palazzo Riccardi with great magnificence.  Clarice, who was tall, slender, and shapely, with long delicate hands and auburn hair, but without great beauty of feature, dressed in white and gold, was borne on horseback through the garlanded way, in a procession of girls and matrons, trumpeters and pipers, all Florence following after to the Palace.  There in the loggia above the garden she dined with the newly-married ladies of the city.  In the courtyard, round the David of Donatello, some seventy of the greatest among the citizens sat together, while the stewards were all sons of the grandi.  Piero de’ Medici entertained each day some thousand guests, while for their entertainment mimic battles were fought, and in the manner of the time wooden forts were built, defended, and taken by assault, and at night there were dances and songs.  Almost immediately after the marriage Lorenzo set out for Milan to visit the new Duke, and stand godfather to his heir.  All his way through Prato, Pistoja, Lucca, Pietrasanta Sarzana, Pontremoli to Milan was a triumphal progress.  He came home to find his father ailing, and on 2nd December 1469, Piero de’ Medici died.  He was buried in S. Lorenzo, in a tomb made by Verrocchio.

It was to a great extent owing to the prompt action of Tommaso Soderini that the power of the Medici did not pass away at Piero’s death, as that of many another family had done in Florence.  The tried friend of that house, Soderini gathered some six hundred of the leading citizens in the convent of S. Antonio, and, as it seems, with the help of the relatives of Luca Pitti, persuaded them that the fortunes of Florence were wrapped up in the Medici.  “The second day after my father’s death,” writes Lorenzo in his Memoir, “although I, Lorenzo, was very young, in fact only in my twenty-first year, the leading men of the city and of the ruling party came to our house to express their sorrow for our misfortune, and to persuade me to take upon myself the charge of the government of the city as my grandfather and father had already done.  This proposal being contrary to the instincts of my age, and entailing great labour and danger, I accepted against my will, and only for the sake of protecting my friends and our own fortunes, for in Florence one can ill live in the possession of wealth without control of the government.”  Thus Lorenzo came to be tyrant of Florence.  It was a rule illegitimate in its essence, purchased with gold, and without any outward sign of office.  That it would come to be disputed might have seemed certain.

FOOTNOTES: 

[96] The Alberghettino was the prison in the great tower.

XV.  FLORENCE

SAN MARCO AND SAVONAROLA