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and reserved some of the most exquisite tortures for them.
    During the fourteenth century, Florence grew rich in the woolen cloth trade and banking, and by the end of the century it was one of the five largest cities in Europe. As the fifteenth century dawned, Florence hosted one of those inexplicable flowerings of genius that have occurred fewer than half a dozen times in human history. It would later be called the Renaissance, the “rebirth,” following the long darkness of the Middle Ages. Between the birth of Masaccio in 1401 and the death of Galileo in 1642, Florentines largely invented the modern world. They revolutionized art, architecture, music, astronomy, mathematics, and navigation. They created the modern banking system with the invention of the letter of credit. The gold florin, with the Florentine lily on one side and John the Baptist wearing a hairshirt on the other, became the coin of Europe. This landlocked city on an unnavigable river produced brilliant navigators who explored and mapped the New World, and one even gave America its name.
    More than that, Florence invented the very
idea
of the modern world. With the Renaissance, Florentines threw off the yoke of medievalism, in which God stood at the center of the universe and human existence on earth was but a dark, fleeting passage to the glorious life to come. The Renaissance placed humanity at the center of the universe and declared this life as the main event. The course of Western civilization was changed forever.
    The Florentine Renaissance was largely financed by a single family, the Medicis. They first came to prominence in 1434 under the leadership of Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, a Florentine banker of great wealth. The Medicis ruled the city from behind the scenes, with a clever system of patronage, alliances, and influence. Although a mercantile family, from the very beginning they poured money into the arts. Giovanni’s great-grandson, Lorenzo the Magnificent, was the very epitome of the term “Renaissance man.” As a boy, Lorenzo had been astonishingly gifted, and he was given the finest education money could buy, becoming an accomplished jouster, hawker, hunter, and racehorse breeder. Early portraits of Lorenzo il Magnifico reveal an intense young man with furrowed brows, a big, Nixonesque nose, and straight hair. He assumed leadership of the city in 1469, on the death of his father, when he was only twenty years old. He gathered around him such men as Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Michelangelo, and the philosopher Pico della Mirandola.
    Lorenzo ushered Florence into a golden age. But even at the height of the Renaissance, beauty mingled with blood, civilization with savagery, in this city of paradox and contradiction. In 1478 a rival banking family, the Pazzis, attempted a coup d’état against Medici rule. The name Pazzi means, literally, “Madmen,” and it was given to an ancestor to honor his insane courage in being one of the first soldiers over the walls of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. The Pazzis had the distinction of seeing two of their members cast into hell by Dante, who gave one a “doggish grin.”
    On a quiet Sunday in April, a gang of Pazzi murderers set upon Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano at their most vulnerable moment, during the Elevation of the Host at Mass in the Duomo. They killed Giuliano, but Lorenzo, stabbed several times, managed to escape and lock himself in the sacristy. Florentines were enraged at this attack on their patron family and, in a howling mob, went after the conspirators. One of the leaders, Jacopo de’ Pazzi, was hanged from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio, his body then stripped, dragged through the streets, and tossed in the Arno River. Despite this setback, the Pazzi family survived, not long afterward giving the world the famed ecstatic nun Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, who amazed witnesses with her gasping, moaning transports when seized by