Who lured his cousin, confidant, and sovereign by promising him sex with one of their famously virtuous relatives, and then stabbed him repeatedly, remaining in the bloody murder chamber for more than three hours afterwards, to laugh and joke about it with his lackey-accomplices? We know from the subtitle that it was Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de’ Medici, who thus dispatched Alessandro de’ Medici, duke of Florence, in 1537.
But did he do this in his character of Lorenzino, as many called him, or as his evil twin, Lorenzaccio, the pejorative nickname that others used? Both nicknames were acquired earlier than the crime that made him famous. He was Lorenzino—Little Lorenzo—possibly to distinguish him from his august forebear. Even his admirers knew that he was no Lorenzo the Magnificent. The diminutive might also have referred to his having once been a studious, philosophically inclined youth from the lesser branch of the Medici family, and thus not perceived to be of consequence in that politically volatile time.
But when he came under the protection of another relative, Pope Clement VII, whom he managed to antagonize by running around Rome chopping off the heads of classical statues, he was more often known as Lorenzaccio—Bad Lorenzo. The pope, who had been rather fond of him, sent him home to Florence to become Alessandro’s companion in debauchery. And the two cousins seemed to be getting along at this so well. That it was plausible to Alessandro that Lorenzo would deliver his chaste aunt while the duke awaited her, stripped, in bed, gives us a notion of their idea of fun.
So why did Lorenzo murder Alessandro? History has rendered contradictory opinions. There are those who believed from the first that it was an heroic, selfless act to rid Florence of a repulsive tyrant. They considered Lorenzino the Florentine Brutus. Others drew the conclusion that any high school counselor would have: that a boy who gets away with committing major public vandalism is not going to end well.
Understandably, Lorenzo preferred the former explanation, and did everything he could to be the hero of the anti-Medici movement—admitting it to be awkward that he was also a Medici—although he had never before shown any sign of such sentiments. He immediately announced his act to people who had not yet received the news and started writing an “Apologia,” declaring the crime tyrannicide. And although even the Florentine exiles who rejoiced at the assassination wondered why he fled without attempting to rally the populace to seize liberty, they embraced him. He spent his remaining years dabbling in international politics and even unsuccessfully pursuing a bishopric, while jumping around to avoid retaliation for his crime.
Eventually, they got him—although who “they” were was muddled from the first. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (Alessandro’s father-in-law) and Cosimo (Alessandro’s successor) sent so many spies and would-be assassins to Venice, where Lorenzo ultimately sought refuge, that they were falling all over one another. “Here it is completely full of spies,” an indignant spy reported to Cosimo, sounding like today’s tourists who complain that there are too many tourists in Venice.
When Lorenzo was finally stabbed to death, one suspect protested his innocence with the excuse that he was busy working on a different assassination at the time, that of Lorenzo’s brother-in-law. Another was taken so by surprise that he incorrectly assumed that the plot he engineered had succeeded, only to find that an entirely different set of hirelings had gotten there first.
Yet one does wonder what took so long—11 years after the murder of Alessandro—considering that Lorenzo’s enemies were powerful monarchs and that this was 16th-century Italy, where there was no shortage of assassins-for-hire and a huge reward was offered.
It is stated at the beginning of The Duke’s Assassin that we will not discover whether Lorenzo’s motive was personal or political. So forget the psychological drama angle. For lurid versions, one must turn to the play Lorenzino by Alexandre Dumas père, or Lorenzaccio by Alfred de Musset. Nor does this book exploit the gossip potential of Lorenzo’s Venetian exile: his friendship with the papal nuncio there, Giovanni Della Casa, author of Galateo: The Rules of Polite Behavior, an etiquette book that is still quoted in Italy; his snubbing by his erstwhile friend Benvenuto Cellini because the sculptor had received from Cosimo a commission for a statue of Perseus; his condemnation by the iconoclastic (and pornographic) poet Pietro Aretino; and even Lorenzo’s love interest, presumed to be a married aristocratic Venetian woman, for whom he risked his safety.
What the author has done, instead, is present documentary evidence questioning both interpretations, which he believes arose from the opposite prejudices of glamorizing and vilifying Lorenzo. Thus it is not a why-done-it but a demonstration of the pitfalls of history. A research fellow at the University of Leeds, Stefano Dall’Aglio keeps jabbing at other academicians, ancient and modern, for misinterpreting or just plain missing documentary evidence. His chief point is that the impetus for killing Lorenzo, and indeed the execution, came from Charles V, whose motivation was both political and personal—from his daughter, known during her widowhood as Sad Margaret—whereas Cosimo, whom history has credited with revenge, participated only reluctantly and ineffectually. And yet the emperor helped fuel the widespread notion that Cosimo was responsible.
But there are also lessons here for the general reader about the unknowability of the past. There is no shortage of
contemporary reports about the two murders from participants, eyewitnesses, and diplomats (whose dispatches provided a new nickname, always referring to him as Lorenzo the Traitor). And that is even before later historians start drawing on one another as secondary sources.
And yet, everyone has an angle. The grotesque revels in Alessandro’s murder chamber were originally described by Lorenzo and one of his accomplices—who, one would think, might have put a better spin on it—but their accounts vary and also differ from testimony in the Florentine sentence pronounced soon afterward. At dispute were such matters as when Lorenzo arranged his escape, the names of the participants, and whether they were concealed in the murder chamber or entered once the crime had begun.
Lorenzino or Lorenzaccio? The question of Lorenzo’s motive remains. We are left with a choice, garnered over the centuries: Contemporary theories included not only noble republican idealism and “his naturally evil mind and ill will,” but also “the most intense desire to make himself immortal” and the constant study of Greek literature, which would make him thirst for glory.
Judith Martin, who writes the Miss Manners column, is the author of No Vulgar Hotel: The Desire and Pursuit of Venice.
