By William Landon, Northern Kentucky University
The city of Rome was sacked on May 6, 1527. The Medici were persuaded to leave Florence and on May 16, a new balìa, or emergency government, decreed that the Great Council—the backbone of Florence’s republican tradition—would be called to order. On May 29, the Great Council voted electing Niccolò Capponi, a man of sincere moderation, as the new republic’s gonfaloniere.
Niccolò Capponi
On May 29, the Great Council voted by a margin of nearly 9 to 1 that the office of gonfaloniere should be reinstituted. The gonfaloniere would serve for one year, and thereafter be eligible for reelection.
The new gonfaloniere, Niccolò Capponi, oversaw a reconstitution of the republic and its numerous offices and councils. He took actions that should have drawn Florence’s republicans together in excitement about the prospects before them.
But it didn’t, because in the aftermath of the Medici family’s expulsion from Florence, fault lines developed between the city’s republican factions, each linked with a different form of Florence’s republican past.
Republican Faction
Capponi, an aristocrat, was linked with the nobles who had been willing to work alongside the Medici family. He was, therefore, viewed with distrust by a second republican faction.
This faction was represented by numerous members of the former Soderini government, who wished to fashion the new republic along strictly anti-Medicean lines. Capponi and the Soderini adherents were equally maligned by the Savonarolans, a third faction that sought to re-create the radical republic that Savonarola had instituted and overseen.
The stubbornness of the Florentines’ temperament hampered the resurrected public from the moment of its inception. Francesco Guicciardini, a Florentine who witnessed and later commented upon many of these developments, pointed out in his History of Italy that Florence’s generalized hatred for the Medici was linked directly to how they had fleeced the city, via excessive taxation, to fund foreign wars.
This article comes directly from content in the video series How the Medici Shaped the Renaissance. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Destroying Medici Heritage
Pope Leo X and his successor, after the brief pontificate of Adrian VI, Clement VII had spent millions of florins, and Florence was left with nothing whatsoever to show for it.
Guicciardini, and other notable historians, Benedetto Varchi in particular, paid special attention to the fact that the Florentine people, as opposed to the Florentine nobility, vented their anti-Medicean anger by systematically destroying public edifices erected to honor the Medici family, going so far as to deface churches and smash statues of Leo X and Clement VII.
While these acts of targeted destruction were carried out almost exclusively by the Savonarola faction, the rioters were sometimes joined by Soderini republicans.
Guicciardini had this to say about Florence’s common people:
There is more disdain in those who regain their liberty than in those who defend it.
In other words, Guicciardini concluded that the common anti-Medicean populists in Florence detested the city’s aristocracy; whereas the city’s old elite were far less hateful and much more willing to consider multiple avenues to republican renewal at Florence.
Niccolò Capponi and Pope Clement VII
Where Guicciardini looked down his nose at Florence’s ascendant rabble, Niccolò Capponi, feared them.
Having surveyed the scene at Florence, and realizing that the republican factions were turning on themselves, Capponi began to correspond with his old friend—none other than Pope Clement VII—in hopes they might come to a peaceful resolution.
Capponi’s motivations in doing so are best explained by the fact that, while Florence stood at the brink of a civil war, the pope and Emperor Charles V were reopening lines of communication.
Emperor Charles V
Even as Pope Clement had continually petitioned the Florentine Republic to reinstate his family as its head, Emperor Charles V was metaphorically battling Henry VIII of England, who was seeking a papal decree to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon—who happened to be the emperor’s aunt.
In a stunningly shrewd move, Charles let it be known that he would assist Clement in recovering Florence, if he refused Henry’s request to divorce Catherine.
Clement agreed, even though such a move would have been a bitter pill for him to swallow. Charles’s soldiers had destroyed Rome and forced the pope into exile only a brief while earlier.
Francis I
Additionally, Capponi was inclined to seek a military alliance with the Emperor Charles V, which might have been enough to offset the amity between the pope and the emperor, in Florence’s favor.
Unfortunately however, the Florentine nobility, many of whom remained pro-Medicean, had guided the republic into yet another alliance with the French in the League of Cognac. This was headed by the French monarch Francis I, who remained a mortal enemy of Charles and who had only recently been released from captivity in Spain.
Francis had made numerous promises of financial and military support to the Florentine Republic. He paid back debts that he owed to several wealthy Florentine merchants, but additional funding and soldiers and cannon were withheld.
Perhaps more than any other citizen in Florence, Capponi realized that the probability of a Florentine victory against the emperor and the pope was practically nil.
Christ: The King of Florence
Perhaps this is the reason Capponi made a wild swerve, guiding the city into a religious fervor. In the early months of 1528, he led the republic’s Great Council into a vote that officially installed Christ as the king of Florence.
With that successful vote, Capponi was able to assuage some of the distrust that the common people felt toward him, placating the increasingly large Savonarolan faction, even as he continued to communicate with Pope Clement regarding Florence’s capitulation.
Common Questions about Niccolò Capponi and Florence’s Capitulation
Francesco Guicciardini pointed out in his History of Italy that Florence’s generalized hatred for the Medici was linked directly to how they had fleeced the city, via excessive taxation, to fund foreign wars.
Even as Pope Clement had continually petitioned the Florentine Republic to reinstate his family as its head, Emperor Charles V was metaphorically battling Henry VIII of England, who was seeking a papal decree to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon—who happened to be the emperor’s aunt.
The Florentine nobility, many of whom remained pro-Medicean, had guided the republic into yet another alliance with the French in the League of Cognac. This was headed by the French monarch Francis I, who remained a mortal enemy of Emperor Charles V.
