Kísérlet egy 15. századi firenzei összeesküvés társadalomtörténeti aspektusainak megragadására

Absztrakt

The paper endeavours to grasp the socio-historic aspects of the Pazzi conspiracy of Florence, an event that has long been interpreted only from a political history perspective. Angelo Poliziano’s account is the major source for the attempt on Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici lives on 26 April 1478 in the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral. However, the account of the events is biased in favour of the Medici, which – following Sallustius – compiles the “catalogue of sins” of the Pazzi family, whose tradition and holiness in Florence was much more ancient and greater than that of the Medici. A crucial figure of the high political background was Pope Sixtus IV, who intended to gain more infl uence through his relatives (nepos) appointed to the Italian cities (his nephew, Raffaele Riario cardinal) and his confidants (Niccolo Salviati, archbishop of Pisa). The often anti-Medici economic and political manoeuvres of the Curia favoured the Pazzi, who having misjudged the power relations, made an attempt on the lives of the Medici brothers. The republican-sounding slogans asserted by the conspirators during the plot failed to be suffi cient to win the urban public over. The assassinate carried out inside the church, resulting in the death of Giuliano de’ Medici, prompted humiliating executions and retaliation measures – a kind of damnatio memoriae – from the authority’s side, while among the faceless mass it brought about riots, lynch law and – to use Victor Turner’s phrase – symbolic status-reversing rituals against the Corpus and the Res. After Lorenzo de’ Medici had forced Sixtus IV to retreat through canon law manipulations followed by a rapid disarming of his allies, the liquidation and expropriation of the Pazzi banks’ assets took place. Keeping the deceased Giuliano’s memory alive, Lorenzo created a brother-cult carrying antique elements, reminiscent of the worship of Cator and Pollux. I interpret the tombstone made by Michelangelo as a peak of this process extending even after Lorenzo’s death. In this paper I argue that the Pazzi-conspiracy – fi tting into the list first complied by Burckhardt of 15th century Italian attacks mainly carried out inside or close to sacral places (against Giovanni Maria Visconti, the Chiavelli, Pope Nicholas V, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, etc.) – is not a heroic act of republican aristocrats ((J. Burckhardt), neither a “renaissance thriller” (L. Martines), but a political criminal act, whose socio-historical and anthropological mechanisms may serve as an explanation for the deliberate destruction of the Pazzi’s ageold authority and for the expansion of the intensifying Medici cult during the Lorenzo period.