April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici [Hardcover]

Lauro Martines (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 24, 2003

One of the world's leading historians of Renaissance Italy brings to life here the vibrant--and violent--society of fifteenth-century Florence. His disturbing narrative opens up an entire culture, revealing the dark side of Renaissance man and politician Lorenzo de' Medici.
On a Sunday in April 1478, assassins attacked Lorenzo and his brother as they attended Mass in the cathedral of Florence. Lorenzo scrambled to safety as Giuliano bled to death on the cathedral floor. April Blood moves outward in time and space from that murderous event, unfolding a story of tangled passions, ambition, treachery, and revenge. The conspiracy was led by one of the city's most noble clans, the Pazzi, financiers who feared and resented the Medici's swaggering new role as political bosses--but the web of intrigue spread through all of Italy. Bankers, mercenaries, the Duke of Urbino, the King of Naples, and Pope Sixtus IV entered secretly into the plot. Florence was plunged into a peninsular war, and Lorenzo was soon fighting for his own and his family's survival.
The failed assassination doomed the Pazzi. Medici revenge was swift and brutal--plotters were hanged or beheaded, innocents were hacked to pieces, and bodies were put out to dangle from the windows of the government palace. All remaining members of the larger Pazzi clan were forced to change their surname, and every public sign or symbol of the family was expunged or destroyed.
April Blood offers us a fresh portrait of Renaissance Florence, where dazzling artistic achievements went side by side with violence, craft, and bare-knuckle politics. At the center of the canvas is the figure of Lorenzo the Magnificent--poet, statesman, connoisseur, patron of the arts, and ruthless "boss of bosses." This extraordinarily vivid account of a turning point in the Italian Renaissance is bound to become a lasting work of history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

One April Sunday in 1478, assassins-with the support of a member of the Pazzi, one of Florence's leading families-killed a member of the ruling family of Florence, Giuliano de Medici, and wounded his brother, Lorenzo. In the hands of Martines, a professor emeritus of European history at UCLA, the rebellion and Lorenzo's ensuing crackdown becomes a prism through which to view Renaissance Florence. He details the many people involved, from bankers to the king of Naples and even Pope Sixtus. Long seen as a "Renaissance man," Lorenzo was a poet and a patron of the arts. But Martines turns the story on its head. He sees the plot as a reaction to the corruption in Medici rule and the crackdown-which included hangings and prohibitions against marrying female members of the Pazzi family-as overly harsh: "[I]t required war or a successful act of terrorism to overthrow Lorenzo, his cronies, and his creatures." While the crackdown temporarily saved the Medici rule, Martines argues that Lorenzo's ruthlessness eventually turned much of Florence against his family and foretold the end of Medici rule in the city. During the past few decades, historians have increasingly placed social, cultural and women's history at the center of European history. But not here. Drawing upon a lifetime of scholarship, Martines has created a book that places governmental politics at Renaissance Florence's center. And along the way, he has written a book as lively as its subject.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"This finely wrought account, combining the power of a broad brush with the delicacy of intricate detail, will remain the standard against which all other works on the topic will be judged."--Renaissance Quarterly

"An intriguing book.... Every situation and character Martines presents to us in April Blood is of marvelous complexity: he writes of the learned Pope turned feverish nepotist, the hardened mercenary who will not kill in church, the lucid Lorenzo, who hates the Church's nepotism and yet does everything he can to get his son made a cardinal; then we have the general picture of a religious age in love with transgression, of a republican citizenry avid for the trappings of hierarchy.... The exhilaration and humiliation of a fake democracy, at once so relevant to the modern world and so difficult to pin down, is the real subject of April Blood and the key to understanding the Pazzi conspiracy."--Tim Page, The New York Review of Books

"In April Blood, one can follow the Renaissance plot to murder Lorenzo de Medici...like one of those works of true-crime reporting that frequently make the best-seller list.... This is just the sort of historical mystery that should appeal to fans of, say, Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning (about the murder of Christopher Marlowe) or Josephine Tey's classic The Daughter of Time, in which her fictional detective reopens the case of Richard III"s involvement in the murder of the princes in the Tower."--Washington Post

"Fascinating.... Martines is a master researcher and, like a collector showing off his treasures, his delight in his findings sparkles on every page. The chapter on marriage alone is worth the price of the book (Lorenzo was the champion marriage broker of his day)."--Philadelphia Inquirer

"Lauro Martines expertly places the sensational plot to murder Lorenzo de' Medici in its wider social and political contexts, untangling the motives and intrigues of numerous unsavoury personalities. A fascinatingly gruesome portrait of an age when politics was more apt to be conducted with daggers and poisons than by courtiers and diplomats."--Ross King, author of the New York Times bestseller, Brunelleschi's Dome

"A spine-chilling political drama of conspiracy, murder at High Mass, and bloody revenge; of men split on the wheel from groin to neck, of soldiers biting into the hearts they have torn from the warm dead and mobs who tear the freshly executed limb from limb; of priests tortured until fat dripped from their feet, of corpses of great men being dragged by taunting urchins through some of the most exquisite and sophisticated cities on Earth, while their solid citizens poke sticks into the putrefying flesh. It tells of a Pope, Sixtus IV, esteemed for his piety and learning, who out of purblind nepotism stoops to assassination, of an Archbishop prepared to build his career on murder, who, at the moment of being hanged, is seen by petrified spectators below to sink his teeth deep into the naked breast of the patrician co-conspirator swinging beside him--this, in the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici."--The Times (London) [more below]

"What makes April Blood as compelling as it is unsettling is its broader canvas, brilliantly illuminated, of the foul consequences of the constant power struggles for place and patronage among men we are more accustomed to think of as paragons of high culture, statesmanship and civilised discourse. Lauro Martines has written a riveting historical thriller that wears great scholarship lightly; but as he probes the rumbling political underbelly of the Italian Renaissance, there is nothing light about the subversiveness of his intent."--The Times (London)

"A finely researched picture of Florentine life dominated by politics and business rather than by the arts. For tourist and scholar alike, it renders that city, at once so radiant and so grim, in a larger whole."--Colin Walters, Washington Times

"Elegant and insightful."--Library Journal

"His debunking of the overly sunny, refulgently cultured 'Florence of the Renaissance' is long overdue. This portrait of Renaissance Florence is a good deal darker and more menacing than most; but, with its shadows and chiaroscuro, it is a picture that seems convincingly real."--John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph

"Elegant and incisive.... Posing the classic 'what if?' question, Martines concludes that the longer term interests of Florentine republicanism might have been better served if the charismatic Lorenzo had indeed been killed on that April morning."--The Sunday Times

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First edition. edition (April 24, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195152956
• ISBN-13: 978-0195152951
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #588,773 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars brilliant study of Renaissance politics, November 24, 2004

By 

Theophanu (Hattiesburg, MS USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici (Hardcover)

I was astonished to see that somebody gave this book such a low review; I'm a professional historian and can firmly say this is the best history book I've read this year. In this work, Martines has performed a very important service: he has to some extent "debunked" the myth of the Medici as sweet, kind, gentle art patrons who rule by love over their equals. By focussing on the Pazzi conspiracy to murder the two leading Medici in 1478, Martines has addressed head-on the question of why so many people wanted to murder them, and how Lorenzo consolidated his position in the wake of the assassination plot. It's a dark, bloody, and very convincing Renaissance that Martines portrays, interweaving the Medici family with the Florentine and Italian political world of the time. The book is brilliantly written; after reading a library copy, I went and bought my own because I know I'll be visiting it again and again.

18 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The stab that ignited Italy..., September 17, 2003

By 

isala "Isabel and Lars" (London, England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici (Hardcover)

This is the story about the Pazzi Conspiracy against the Medici dictatorship in renaissance Florence. The story is riveting, full of facts, and, on the whole, well told. The author gives a brief history of the families involved and of the florentine political system to give us a background to the conspiracy. The assault in the cathedral and the following bloodbath is told in clear and vivid detail. So far the book is great, just great. Then it is as if the author ran out of time! The Pazzi War and what happened to the Pazzi family members that did not die is described in an almost perfunctory way. The lives of Lorenzo's sons, daughters, and other surviving relatives are dealt with in just a few lines. Maybe the author expects the reader to get that information in more general histories of the Italian Rennaisance.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting Event Not Well Told, March 5, 2004

By 

Gordon C. Duus (Glen Ridge, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici (Hardcover)

This book tells the story of the 1478 plot to assassinate the Medici brothers in Renaissance Florence in what was essentially a failed coup d'etat. After the first chapter summarizes the key facts, the balance of the book is spent providing the context surrounding the event. In so doing, the author describes the politics of Florence, its economy, and its place in Italy and southern Europe. He details how the wealthiest familties interacted, formed alliances through marriage and competed for power. He describes the conspirators in Florence, as well as in the surrounding city-states and the highest levels of the Catholic Church. While this should make a fascinating story, this book fails to tell it. So many extraneous and incidental facts and characters are detailed after the best parts of the story have already been revealed that I had difficulty sustaining interest and labored to finish the book.

The Renaissance in Florence was the pinnacle of one of the great cities of the World. Lorenzo di Medici was the central figure of the time. He employed Leonardo di Vinci, he adopted Michelangelo, his son and nephew became pope, and his family ruled in and around Tuscany for over a hundred years. If you are looking for this incredible story, look elsewhere--you will not find it in April Blood.