S14E03

Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. In this episode, we're continuing our journey across Renaissance Europe, retracing the leaps and steps of Ezio Auditore, the protagonist of Assassin's Creed 2, Brotherhood and Revelations. As we heard in last week's episode, the terracotta-tiled city-state of Florence played a leading role in Ezio's homeland. At its height in the 15th century, Florence was ruled by a family renowned for their banking nous and towering intellect, the Medici. As patrons of the famous artists Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and lavish investors in the city's architecture, they oversaw a golden age in Florence's glittering Renaissance history. But in 1478, it almost came crashing down before it had even begun. A conspiracy was concocted that aimed to extinguish the Medici line. This is the story of how it unfolded. The bells are ringing loudly, calling you closer to the tower that casts its shadow over Florence. You step out onto the cobbled square and against the pale morning sky, the Catidale di Santa Maria di Fiore rises heavenward before you. It's April 1478 and today feels just like any other spring-sundee morning. The terracotta-tiled dome of the cathedral with its porthole windows looks impossibly big. It is truly a feat of design, you think, as you make your way across the piazza to the great western doors. The facade isn't yet finished but promises to be a kaleidoscope of panels and patterns. After all, this great church is a reminder of the wealth and influence of the city. The bell tolls again. It's time for high mass and you join the immense crowd making their way inside. The cathedral's interior is lit dimly by soft candlelight. The air is thick with the smell of sweet incense. You keep to the shadowed archways, watching people from across the social spectrum make their way in, from commoners to the city's elite. Heads incline as two particularly well-dressed figures make their way up the central aisle. The Medici brothers, Lorenzo and Giuliano, their velvet coats brush against the stone floor as they take their place at the front. Everyone is looking at them. They are the kings of Florence. Someone next to you whispers how unusual it is that both brothers have attended. But it is the feast of Easter today, a special occasion. The murmuring of voices dies down as the choir's song rises, echoing across the magnificent space. Standing to the side of a pillar, your gaze shifts to the archbishop, solemnly processing from the back, holding his shepherd's crook. He doesn't resemble a humble herdsman. Instead, he's covered in richly embroidered robes, his crook inlaid with gold. He reaches the front and bows to the altar, covered in flowers and candles. The congregation has knelt now, the choir hushed. The archbishop, Ronaldo Orsini, a relative of the Medici, begins his prayers in Latin. Lorenzo is hard to miss at the front, his head wrapped in a bright scarlet cloth. Across the aisle you recognise Francesco de Patzi, the nobleman and banker, and a known rival of the Medici. You watch him nod at a man across from you, a man employed by the Patzi. It's not just an acknowledgement you realise, but a signal. The man motions to the other Patzi men who rush toward the Medici brothers. Shouting erupts as a scuffle breaks out, the archbishop's Latin chanting halts, and he shouts in warning to his brothers. Francesco Patzi crosses the aisle quickly and grabs the front of Giuliano de Medici's robe. In a flash of silver a blade glides into Giuliano's chest. Screams and cries fill the air as blades clash and blood spills. Lorenzo, wounded, looks around in panic. You step out from the shadows and gesture toward the door leading to the vestry. There is no time to lose, you say. Stunned, briefly, Lorenzo mouths a word of thanks before he is ushered through the door by his men to safety. Blending into the crowd of panicked worshippers, you slip away into the now bustling piazza, unnoticed. The Patzi conspiracy is one of the climaxes in Assassin's Creed 2 and puts players in the shoes of Ezio as he rescues Lorenzo. But of course that's historical fiction. In today's episode we're taking a look behind the curtain and exploring how the real conspiracy unfolded. What did the Patzi want? How close was Lorenzo de Medici to meeting his maker? And what impact did the conspiracy have on the city of Florence? To help me answer these questions and unpack the legacy of one of the most intriguing and consequential moments in Renaissance history, I'm joined by author, historian and all-round Renaissance expert, Professor Catherine Fletcher from Manchester Metropolitan University. Catherine, welcome to Echoes of History. It's great to have you on. Yeah, great to be here. And we're here because I want to try and understand this thing called the Patzi conspiracy, which is outside my specialism. I know nothing about this, so this is all new to me. So this moment provides something of a dramatic climax to Assassin's Creed 2 when players are dragged into the Patzi conspiracy. So I wondered if we could start off by answering the question, why is it called the Patzi conspiracy? What is the Patzi part of it? Well, the Patzi is one family and they are a big deal rival family to the Medici. Medici you might have heard of as rulers of Florence. So we go back to the 15th century, the Medici have made their fortune from banking and the people who have got closest to the Medici in terms of power, indeed, in one case, have actually married into the Medici families. The two families who got marriage alliance, they are called the Patzi. And I should also explain that in Italian, the word Patzo means mad or crazy. So these are the kind of crazy people, but it's not, you know, actually, you get a lot of jokes around the Patzi and people being Patzo and so on. But for the purposes of this, we're basically talking about two families of bankers. Not more exciting than banking today, really, you generally get the impression it's quite rare that you get bankers murdered on each other these days. But, you know, back in the day, it was very much a thing. Fascinating to think about a turf war involving bankers. That's not something we would get on the streets of Florence today, I guess. I mean, there was that one guy who was the Vatican banker who died in quite mysterious circumstances. So I'm not saying it doesn't happen at all. But certainly you go down the city of London, you don't expect, I don't know, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to be like lining up against each other, ready to do some kind of stabbing. And so we've got the Patzi family involved and the Medici are their targets. So this is the result of just a rivalry between the two families, essentially. In part, this is a conspiracy about two rival families fighting it out for power in Florence. But it's also a bigger conspiracy because this is not just about who has got the biggest bank or who is the most powerful family. It is also really about who is going to be in charge of the city. So Florence, the city state of Florence at this point is one of five big states on the Italian peninsula. So you've got Milan, Venice, Florence, the Papal States, which is the pope running not just the little bit of the Vatican where the museums are in St. Peter's today, but a whole chunk of central Italy going right up to Bologna. And then in the south, you've got the King of Naples. You've got a very complicated geopolitical situation. You've also got all these small princes who hire themselves out as mercenary commanders to the bigger republics and principalities. Pretty complicated situation. And at the time of this conspiracy, Florence, where the Medici are pretty much the most powerful family in government, are in an alliance more or less with Milan and Venice. Talking quite loosely here. This all gets very detailed and complex. And in the south, you've got the Pope and the King of Naples, again, in quite a loose alliance. And they in this big picture are more or less backing the Papsi because of a row over a loan. So the Pope has tried to get a loan from the Medici family first. They've turned him down and so he has gone to the Papsi. And weird thing about all this, the Pope actually is trying to get this loan to buy Emola. Have you heard of Emola? No, no. Emola now is only famous for the Formula One. No to racing, yes. Yeah. Yeah, the motor racing. Right. So now, Emola has basically got motor racing. Back in the day, it was a small sort of little lordship with a decent fortified castle. And the Pope was trying to buy it from the Duke of Milan for his nephew. They do a lot of shopping around these little sort of lordships and you get some tax revenue and you see whether it's kind of worth it. But so the Medici turned down the loan, the Pansi gave the loan. So Pope is well in here with the Papsi and he's extremely crossed with the Medici. Because you imagine, I mean, you've been turned up for a loan, you know, by your bankers. It's not a pleasant experience. And so he starts really going out to the Medici. He runs the Medici bean bankers to the Pope for quite some time. But the Pope, Pope 6th and 4th, kicks the Medici out, starts auditing their accounts and looking into some of the detail about their alum, you know, their alum production and so on. It all gets quite unpleasant. And at this point, it's really on that on that sort of business level, making things financially difficult. But over time, it escalates the point where the Pansi decide that actually what they really want, is the Medici all together out of the way. Wow. I mean, so this is just all comes back down to money and the Pope, you know, I don't know the Pope using loans from people and trying to tear apart the people who won't give him the money that he wants to go and buy lordships for his family. It's all a bit of a tangled mess, isn't it? It is very messy. And it's also messy because, you know, the Medici at this point, they are not straightforwardly the kings or princes of Florence. They exercise power through this complex set of alliances. And by means the fact that Florence actually has quite a fast turnover of government. So at any given point, there are nine men whose names are drawn from a sort of a list of those eligible, which is obviously very heavily manipulated sometimes. And they take office as the priors and the gun for L'Oreal. They make decisions, and quite briefly, and the Medici exercise a lot of power behind the scenes in this system. But it's also a system in which obviously, you know, it's not like overthrowing the prince of a state. There is a mechanism of capturing the government if the Medici really properly got out of the way. So there's a plot. There's a plot involving the Pazzi family, the Pope, King Ferrante, the rulers of the small state of Urbino, various other individuals, including the Salviati family, who later will marry back into the Medici and become actually... Yeah, certain people make up later on. But all these people who have an interest in getting the Medici out of power in Florence line up with a scheme to kill the two main members of the family, the brothers, Lorenzo, who's 28 at this point, you know, really still pretty young, has inherited, has come into power pretty young, and his brother, Giuliano. Today, if we fall out with our bank, we kind of just do a very quick move your money across to someone else. This is just a next level reaction to having a banking issue. For the Pope, particularly, to get involved in a hit on the leaders of the bank that have turned him down for a loan. It's just, it's mind blowing. It's crazy. There's, I mean, there's also in Florence a lot of frustration with the Medici family, because there's a sense that the Medici are gradually moving towards becoming more and more autocratic, are behaving more like kings. So there's actually an earlier Pope, Pope Pius II, who describes Cosimo the Elder, a couple of generations prior to this, as king in all but name. And, you know, there are people around Florence who think, look, this family are all very well, but they are behaving like absolute rulers. And I mean, in the end, by the 1530s, so another 60 years on from this, the Medici will be the princes of Florence. So they are on that trajectory. But there are a lot of people who would really like to stop them. I think this is partly what, you know, the thinking behind the conspiracy is that perhaps there's going to be enough opposition in Florence to make this work. You get rid of the leaders of the family. They're relatively young. There isn't perhaps a very senior man in the family with lots of experience of running military campaigns, of running diplomatic campaigns. They they pick their moment, having already chipped away on the financial side in terms of, you know, cutting away at the Medici banks and potential with the papal accounts, for example. And they think maybe this assassination plus what is effectively a planned invasion of Florence by troops that are stationed all around the city, that this is going to kick the Medici out of power and enable the patsy and other rivals in the city, but also other people outside that, you know, with the support of the other princes of Italy, they are going to be able to overthrow the Medici. So we've essentially got, I'm saying essentially like it's not complicated, but we've got rival families, financial disputes, the Pope getting involved in a murder plot, and we can add to that the kind of socio-political status of Florence being sort of on the line and the Medici kind of teetering on the brink of not being what the people of Florence want anymore. And I guess the conspiracy relying on the fact that they can play on that too. So all of this is coming together in this huge melting pot. Yeah, I mean, it's incredible. One of the things that's really incredible to me is just how long this to and fro between the Medici and their rivals in Florence last. I mean, they've been exiled once already in 1433. They're going to have a go in the 1470s. They will actually be properly exiled again in 1494 and kicked out of power until 1512. So they have 18 years out of power then. So this is not some idea that, you know, this is not an impossible dream, getting the Medici out of power. A bit further down the line, some people are going to succeed in doing it. In a slightly different political context. But you look, these people have got enemies. They are a very, very powerful family and that has created resentment. So fundamentally, yeah, there's all this tension. There are all these people who are up for doing this. Or at least there are enough of them to keep, you know, to make it plausible that you might pull this off. And of course, there's the conspiracy itself. And then there's all the, you know, the waiting military invasion outside holding on to see whether the murder is going to work. So as the conspiracy builds, what is their plan? We know they're planning to attack two of the Medici family. Do they have any specific dates and times and places in mind? Do we know that they were planning to do it when and where they did it? Well, they've actually gone through several plans before they get to the one that they actually put into practice. So initially, there was a hope that Lorenzo de' Medici was going to go to Rome, which would have meant the Pope and his people were on home ground. That would have been, you know, perhaps a bit of a safer option. There was then a plan for the 19th of April, which was filed because Giuliano de' Medici was ill. So he wasn't in the place where they were hoping that he would be. And so they settle on the 26th of April, 1478, and they are going to do the murder in the cathedral. Now, you know, you're a medievalist, you know, like murders in the cathedral. God, there's a little bit of a tradition to this. There is, I mean, which is surprising because it's such a shocking thing to contemplate killing someone in the house of God to the medieval mind that it's shocking how many times it happens. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, so, you know, they do it, but it's partly because this is where these quite powerful people are accessible. You don't you're probably quite cautious about bringing a big entourage of bodyguards with lots of weapons and kit into the cathedral with you. That might be something that, you know, not seen as appropriate. The Duke of Milan, Galliander Maria Sforza, has previously just sort of up the road been murdered in a cathedral a few years beforehand. So there's a bit of precedent to this when they decide to go for it. But it also causes the problems because one of their assassins gets some scruples about doing this and says, I don't really want to do a murder on sacred ground. I'm sorry, that's crossing a line for me. So he, the Count of Montezeco, actually drops out and they have to rope in these other two guys quite at the last minute as alternatives to priests called Stefano da Bagnone and Antonio Maffei. And so they're actually working with the B team when they finally go for this hit in the cathedral. And that's maybe one of the factors in why it doesn't work out. This isn't sounding like a great idea anymore. If it was a good idea in the first place, it's starting to sound like maybe you should just give it a miss. Yeah, well, you know, when your professional assassin is saying, I'm just not sure about this. Yeah, that may be the point of which when your hitman is declining the options, roping in a couple of amateurs to give it a go is yeah, I would call that risky. The Pazzi family are very much like we've had enough of experts, we don't need that. Let's get us some randomers off the street to do it instead. Yeah, exactly. So they're just, well, I mean, the other thing is they've had several plots that have not gone ahead for one reason or another. It's like, okay, look, we've got these police troops on standby outside the city, we can't leave them there forever. Somebody is going to notice that there's a bunch of soldiers to the south. And that's going to start ringing alarm bells. So to some extent, they are, they do either have to go for it or just absolutely call it quits and regroup and replan and they obviously decide to go for it. And so there's a bit of a last minute crisis on the day because Giuliano de' Medici isn't going to attend. But they manage to, they start the process. Francesca de' Pazzi and Bernardo Barrichello managed to get Giuliano de' Medici and to murder him. These two last minute substitutes, Stefano Antonio, go for Lorenzo de' Medici, but Lorenzo manages to get away from them. And Barrichello instead kills Francesco Nori, who's a manager at the Medici bank, and things head into chaos because they haven't got Lorenzo, got somebody else instead. Lorenzo has sort of hidden himself away in the North Saturisty of the cathedral. Meanwhile, so as this is all going wrong in the cathedral, Archbishop Salviati, the Archbishop of Pisa, one of the conspirators, tries to go and take the main palazzo, what we now call the palazzo Vecchio, then it wasn't the old palace, it was just the palace, the Palazzo della Signoria. He doesn't try to take the palace, but he's captured. People do not buy this, I am taking over and launching a coup business. And that then, his failure, then compromises the efforts of another of the Pazzi family, Jacopo Pazzi, to lead troops in because there are people throwing stuff down from the battlements of the palazzo. And it goes wrong and it goes wrong again, because the bells are sounded, the alarm bells. So literally, where we get the word alarm, the alarm bells, is from the Italian al-arm, eh? So two arms. So the bells are being rung to call the people of Florence to arms, papal troops who are meant to be coming into the city from the south are like, oops, they've sounded the alarm bells. Well, we're off then, we're not getting involved in this. So they turn back and eventually most of the conspirators are arrested and seized. Not absolutely all of them quite yet, but most of the main players in the conspiracy who are involved on the day, yeah, taken prisoner, arrested. I'll have to keep my voice down. Because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack? Or Julius Caesar? Or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Betwixt the Sheets, a podcast by History Hit. Because sexuality explored through a historical lens can reveal a surprising amount about the human experience, what's and all, if you'll excuse the pun. And we don't just stop at sex. Expect outrageous scandals throughout the centuries, as well as probing into everyday issues, the nitty gritty of human life that really connects us to all people throughout history. Join me, Kate Lister, every Tuesday and Friday on Betwixt the Sheets to find out more. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Right, time to slide out of here and avoid the bed pun. I was going to say this sounds like one of the worst conspiracy or attempted murders in history. I suppose we ought to say they do get one of their targets. They have killed one of the Medici brothers that they were after. But after that, it seems to turn into a bit of a farce. They're killing the wrong people. Their coups aren't working. The army don't come into the city. The people that they were relying on to be quite happy about the Medici being kicked out are suddenly attacking the conspirators. It's all a bit of a mess. Yeah, I think the main lesson is do not put bankers at the head of your murder conspiracy. Get somebody in who's your leading special forces military guy. And whether that guy is saying, I'm not going ahead with this, maybe think that this is the point at which to pause with your conspiracy. So yeah, it just really goes from bad to worse for them. Really, there are various people in the entourage who just sort of immediately summarily executed. Francesca de Patze is killed and hung out of the windows. So is Bernardo Barrichello. So is Francesca Salviati, the archbishop and another brother and cousin Salviati family. And so these people are being hung out of the windows, the Palazzo Vecchio. And there's this weird story actually, that the archbishop of Salviati sort of sinks his teeth into the body of Francesca de Patze while they're kind of hanging out of this window together. Extremely messy, very, very nasty tale of of Jacobo Patze. He gets his body hung from the Palazzo. They take it down and bury it out of town. And then some of the city lads think, ah, you know what, we're going to go dig up this body, drag it around town a bit, they dump it in the river, they drag it out of the river, they beat it up some more. And then they eventually like ditch it. So there is a whole like, you know, there's bodies being thrown out into the piazza, ripped apart by the crowds. It's a pretty nasty business, this initial round of revenge. And even up until a decade later, you know, people are still, we need some cases people with their own access to grind against men vaguely connected to the conspiracy and going after them and just sort of killing them and saying like, writing to Lorenzo de Medici and saying, hey, we killed one of those guys who did that conspiracy against you 10 years back. Please thank us. Every time I think this can't get more weird and bizarre. We've got churchmen biting hanging corpses and the locals beating up bodies that they've dug up. It just gets stranger and stranger as it goes on. I was going to ask what the reaction of the people of Florence was. Because I guess there's a danger from the patsy perspective that what they did reinforced what was previously flagging support for the Medici. And it looks like the city could sort of come out and fall in favour of the Medici rather than wanting to kick them out. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think right at the end, it's interesting there's a Guicardini Francesca Guicardini, who's one of the most important 16th century historians of Florence, says that the patsy uprising so revived Lorenzo's name and fortunes that it may be said most happy was that day for him. So yeah, he also he lost his brother's rivalry. I mean, that's quite cynical. But for Lorenzo, he, his enemies were eliminated and in fact, you know, he ends up eventually and it takes a while. It takes a while because in the immediate aftermath, what was the conspirators backers can do is to seize the Medici assets in Rome and Naples, put a load of surveillance onto the lives of Florentines in Rome, making their lives very difficult. There is a war is a small it's not a major war, but there's a small war for various fortresses south of Florence. So there are ways in which it's not a great situation for the Medici. But in terms of the city politics, yet there has been a backlash people have seen that the patsy have failed, they have not killed Lorenzo. And the general response of the crowd seems to be okay, we can see who is the winning side here, we are not going to jump on to the side of the patsy. And so, you know, for all that it takes a certain amount of time internationally and has the relations with the other princes for Lorenzo to really get back on top of things. Internally in Florence, yeah, they go after the patsy money, they force all the members of the family to change their names, they make a ruling that any man who marries a woman from the patsy family will be excluded from Florentine political office. And they get Botticelli to make it to paint a mural of the traitors up on the wall, just so that everybody remembers. Yeah, we've got leading city artists, you know, we know Botticelli mainly famous for the Primavera, the Venus on her shell. But he's also doing the, you know, the big mural. So we all remember what happened to that lot. And it's interesting, they get the assassin, the Count of Montecirque Giovanni Battista, who refused to do it in the end, to make a confession. And his confession implicates the Pope, members of the Pope's family, the head of the patsy family, and interestingly leaves out a couple of people who Lorenzo wants to try and rebuild diplomatic relations with, including the King of Naples. So there's a lot of political maneuvering going on to sort of smooth things over afterwards. Takes quite a while. And then two years later, the Ottomans invade southern Italy, and that distracts everything, everybody's minds like, oops, the Ottomans invaded, that's a real proper crisis, we're not going to worry about this little domestic incident. Now, that is the big deal down in a tranto. So it's interesting how, you know, big geopolitical events can sometimes play in your favour and sometimes, you know, just pull people away in the opposite direction and effectively put an end to this little war. Yeah, yeah. The conspiracy kind of seems like a big moment until something much bigger comes along. And everyone realises there's something existential to worry about now. I guess for Lorenzo as well, in the late medieval mind, surviving that kind of assassination attempt does something for his personal kudos. You know, God has spared him from being assassinated. It must have done something for his his kind of prestige. Was that something he was able to play on at all? I mean, yeah, I think it does. And one of the things he does in the aftermath of all of this is that he makes a personal visit to Naples to talk to and to try and charm the King of Naples into coming onto his side rather than the Pope's. And this is really quite an achievement because the King of Naples is not particularly a fan of the Medici. He's obviously has been on the other side of him in this conspiracy. But Lorenzo turns up to court, plays the game of being the charming courtier. He does the poetry. He goes out hunting. He does all this sort of perfect Renaissance man performance. And eventually he wins over King Ferrante. And he arranges some years on, but he arranges a marriage for his son Piero to a woman called Alphonseena Orsini of the Neapolitan branch of this big baronial family. So it's an extension of this Medici strategy of marrying internationally going beyond Florence, which has just begun with Lorenzo's own marriage to Clorice Orsini of the Roman branch of that family. But they then push it further. So it is really interesting. He does manage to make a comeback and to reestablish his very, very glittering reputation as, you know, one of Lorenzo the Magnificent. You know, that's his little subraché. So yeah, absolutely. He comes out of that conspiracy and really remakes his reputation. And we've seen Lorenzo in Florence. He goes after the patsy and manages to shut them down in lots of different ways. That confession has implicated the Pope. That's not someone that he's chosen to pass over. Is there anything Lorenzo can actually do to get at the Pope? Does he have any teeth in that direction? Well, I mean, in the in the immediate, said Arrigo, what happens is that six and fourth dies. And Lorenzo actually manages to persuade the next Pope in a canto the eighth to marry his illegitimate son to Lorenzo's daughter. So he makes the lies with the next Pope. And then much, much, much later on, after Lorenzo himself is long dead in 1517, the Medici hold the papacy themselves. And Lorenzo's son Giovanni accuses a number of cardinals of conspiracy against him. And these are generally the view is that while there may be some chatter, the charges are rather exaggerated from anything that was going on. And he has some of them exiled, some of their money confiscated, some of them executed. And you know what, funnily enough, the list of names of those cardinals who had got in 1517 is remarkably similar to some of the names that appear amongst the list of the patsy conspirators. And so, you know, it may be, yeah, nearly 40 years in the future, but memories are very long in Renaissance Rome. Wow. I mean, yeah, for 40 years later, to eventually come back, it's clearly someone hadn't forgotten what had gone on in Florence 40 years. One of them is actually the same guy. I mean, he was kind of 17, Raphaelo Riarro. He's a kind of 17 year old nephew of the Pope at the time of the patsy conspiracy. He is in Florence, he claims not really to know anything about it. But then there's a bunch of soldiers with him acting as his entourage. And maybe he was just, you know, completely the fall guy in all of this. He was held hostage for a while afterwards, and eventually freed and allowed to go back to Rome. But he is one of the people who later on, as a cardinal, is directly targeted in this 1517 maneuver by Lorenzo San Giovanni. So yeah, it's extraordinary the way that this, you know, these connections, some of them get mended, some of them are mended. I mean, the Medici and the Salviati family, they intermarry later on. So it isn't always the case that nobody ever forgets, but you do wonder looking at those names. There's something there. It's maybe striking that Lorenzo uses the opportunity, as you sort of alluded to earlier, to make peace with the people he wants peace with, and to go after the people that he doesn't particularly want peace with, or that he would quite like out of his way. Yeah, and I think he gets the he absolutely gets the patsy out of his way, even the one member of the patsy family who's married to a Medici woman, even he is sort of eventually put under house arrest. He is very limited in terms of what he can do, he certainly can't rebuild his family. The one thing the Medici do take a big loss on though, is money. The Medici bank never really recovers from this business. They have lost perhaps up to 200,000 florins, which is a staggering amount of money in the time. And so this does leave the Medici very, very reliant on their position in government and on the public funds. And there are lots of tales about Lorenzo and other family members having their hands in the till. Does that in part lead to them being exiled? Is this all part of the same sort of ripple from the patsy conspiracy? Yeah, that certainly comes into it. I mean, there is one point later on where they are exiled and a Republic of Florence draw up an account of how much they claim the Medici owe the Florentine state. And I can't rub it off the top of my head how much it is, but I'm pretty sure it's in six figures. So this story is current. And of course, the Medici would say, well, look, we are leading citizens. It's a responsibility to have asked to put on spectacular festivals, public entertainments to do public works, projects and all the rest of it. When we have been using public funds, it's been in the public interest. Now, whether your average Florentine would agree with that and say, yeah, actually, that was a great set of public horse racing. I went to the other weekend. Well done. Thank you very much. I had a fabulous time or whether they would say these guys were a disgrace is another whole question and something that is much argued over in Florence itself. So yeah, at one point later on when they get exiled in 1494, this is the world of Gerolimus the Vonerola, who's a real hellfire preacher and preaches a lot against the sort of decadence of the Medici against all this sort of interest in pagan culture, the classical poetry, the art and solid. This is the point at which in the 1490s, we get things like the bonfires of the vanities, we get the virtue advice police going around people's houses and saying any women here using makeup, well, that's not happened anymore. So there's a lot of this really quite radical, sometimes religious minded opposition to what the Medici are doing, as well as opposition from rival families, as well as people who simply think, look, Florence should have a rather more broad based government than one with a very narrow set of oligarchs at the top. There's an incredible sort of ferment of political ideas, religious argument and all the rest of it. Yeah, I was trying to think if I can ever remember a moment when taxpayers were given the opportunity to reflect on whether those spending their taxes did a really good job or not, and have passed up the opportunity to criticize. It's a fairly common theme to say, I didn't want any of that with my tax money. Thank you. No, exactly. And it's tough because sometimes it's quite hard to get the voices of the more ordinary people of Florence as to what they think of any of this. I mean, certainly later on, there are a number of occasions when there are forced loans, there's resistance to forced loans, there are complaints about exclusion from the lists of people entitled to hold political office. There are complaints about the increasing use of emergency committees. So you're equivalent to sort of martial law to make decisions about the city's security. So the minute you have any hint of a war, you can institute an emergency committee and start making decisions out with the normal political processes. And there's quite a lot of that in the later part of the 15th century. And again, that is the sort of thing that gets people's backs up. I was going to ask what you thought was the most significant legacy of the conspiracy. And as we've been talking, I've been trying to work out what I think it was because it obviously destroys the Patsey family. It almost cements the Medici family, except that they then also do get exiled. It's causing Florence to reflect on how it wants to be ruled and what that should look like. Is it, I mean, is it easy to pick out sort of a long term legacy of the Patsey conspiracy? Because then, as you said, the Ottomans come along and invade, and that's a much bigger deal than some spat in Florence. Yeah, it's, I think, to some extent, it's iconic because the Medici family are iconic. And because obviously a murder in the cathedral is a very memorable thing. And because Lorenzo himself manages to escape. And so it's a it's a conspiracy, it's a conspiracy in a way with a sort of happy ending for the target. And it's painted by Botticelli, there's a Leonardo sketch as well. So it's memorialized by some of the really iconic, big name artists of the period. It's written up by all the major Florentine historians, of course, these include not only Guicardini, but somebody like Machiavelli. Now, I mean, I think Machiavelli at the time of the conspiracy is only 13 or so, I think, you know, so he's still at school. But he is obviously someone who is around and records all the doings of the history of Florence. And so I think partly because Florence has so many of these contemporary historians who write up the tales of the Medici and the tales of the Republic, that we sort of see the memorialized and then in and then we have this huge interest in Florence in 19th century and 20th century America as well, which puts them all back on the cultural map and really attracts attention to Florence precisely because all the later republics of the world look back to the Florentine Republic to see how it should or shouldn't be done. American think is really, you know, people like Thomas Jefferson has got copies of Machiavelli in his library, because he's interested in how to do a republic by sort of establishing the American Republic. So I think it's a mixture of all these different things. And it's incredible the way it takes off in popular culture. I mean, we would be talking about this in relation to Assassin's Creed, but where I first came across the Patsy Conspiracy is actually in Hannibal Lecter novels, because there's a whole sort of running joke in the third one of the novels, the ones just called Hannibal, where Hannibal Lecter sort of plays the part of Lorenzo de Medici in the middle of a plot that's based on a Patsy conspiracy, which is just, you know, so it gets recycled and recycled through different pieces of popular culture. And I think that in itself sort of tells us about its cultural grip over time. Yeah, I mean, I was wondering as we were talking, why on earth we still consider it an important moment when it was basically a botched and slightly farcical assassination attempt. But it's clear that even beyond that, it has such significant ripples and effects all across kind of Italy between the families with the papacy with the politics going on inside the Italian peninsula during this period. It's clear that it was a hugely significant moment, even if it was botched. Yeah, and I wonder, you know, if it had been successful, of course, it would have been a significant moment in a different way. You might have got the end of the Medici, the establishment of a different set of people power in Florence, perhaps Florence would have stayed a republic for longer in the same way that Venice or Luca did. You know, there are all sorts of other possibilities. But in the end, it's this conspiracy, effectively gives Lorenz the opportunity to consolidate himself in power, and then just cross his fingers that after his death, his descendants can hold power, which they really struggle with for quite a while, before coming back and really, you know, becoming the dukes of Florence from the firties, 1530s onwards. So yeah, it's an extraordinary story. But very, you know, and I think sometimes with these great families like the Medici, a story of how they nearly fell from power and held on by their fingernails is actually quite an attractive story to tell within their own mythology. How, you know, they tried to come for us and then they didn't, you know, they couldn't. Yeah, so it seems like the conspiracy kind of almost created its own monster. Now they tried to wipe out the Medici and all they really did was make them more powerful in the end. Yeah, and not just in Florence, because I've already said, Lorenzo's son Giovanni became Pope Leo X, but the illegitimate son of the murdered Giuliano became Pope Clement VII. So for any listeners in the UK, we'll know who Pope Clement VII is, because he is the Pope who said no to Henry VIII about the whole divorce business. So there's a very long period afterwards where I suppose, you know, both Lorenzo and Giuliano are in the public eye and internationally as well beyond, beyond Italy, because of what their sons go on to do. And the fact that those two boys become the Medici Pope's ruling with only a very short break between them from 1513 right through until 1534. So, you know, that is also a legacy and that is perhaps a legacy that keeps Giuliano's memory alive as well, because people know that he was the father of Clement VII. It's incredibly far reaching. Just to end on, Cathar, this absolutely blows my mind. The level of detail and the stuff that's going on around this conspiracy is absolutely fascinating. But I always like to offer guests the opportunity at the end of an episode. In Assassin's Creed, you can enter the animus, you can travel back in history and you can witness some of these key moments. I guess it's difficult to say which part of the Patsy conspiracy would you most like to see, because it's, you know, a confined event on one day kind of thing. So either would you like to witness that day in Florence or is there a member of the Medici family who you would particularly like to meet? Do you have a favourite who you would like to have a conversation with? Oh, I think I'm not sure I would have particularly personally want to see much of it happening. I would be fascinated to see what the Botticelli mural looked like. I would really, you know, I would really love to know what such a brilliant artist made of doing a mural of these conspirators. Like how did he show them? What do they look like? So I'm fascinated by that. And I think that the person who I would really like to hear from, who's caught in the middle of it all, is Bianca de Medici, who was married to one of the Patsy family. And of all the people who, you know, we don't really hear from her, like, what did she make of it? What did she think? How was it being caught exactly in the middle of these two very powerful families in a murderous rivalry, knowing that your husband's family had basically decided to kill your birth family, your own family? That must be a pretty traumatic experience. Yeah, I think her voice is one that I would really like to hear from. Yeah, and I guess particularly precarious for her because if it had succeeded, would she be in danger as a Medici? If it failed, is she still under suspicion as being too close to the Patsy family? So she's kind of almost in a dangerously lose-lose situation. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, if I was more of a creative writer, then writing this conspiracy from the point of view of Bianca would be, you know, absolutely fascinating thing to do. There you go. Someone will write that novel now. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Catherine. It's been absolutely fascinating to get into the weeds of all of this and find out exactly what happened at the Duomo in Florence on that crazy day of the Patsy conspiracy. Thank you very much. Great talking to you. Thanks, Matt. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. In the next episode, we'll follow Ezio's legacy across continents to the home of his apprentice, China, during the Ming Dynasty. Don't forget to subscribe and follow Echoes of History wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're enjoying it, you can leave us a review too. I'll see you next time among the Echoes of History.