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other families were indebted to them for loans and gifts; yet others were linked to them by marriage – the Bardi by Contessina’s marriage to Cosimo, the Cavalcanti and Malespini by his brother, Lorenzo’s, marriage to Ginevra Cavalcanti. 2 Moreover, in the close-knit circle of the humanists, Cosimo had numerous friends, whereas Rinaldo degli Albizzi – an outspoken not to say bigoted critic of thenew classical learning as being inimical to the Christian faith – had many enemies.
    Niccolò Niccoli, Carlo Marsuppini, Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni and Ambrogio Traversari were all close friends of Cosimo and each one of them was already an influential figure in Florentine society. They were all remarkable men. Niccolò Niccoli, the handsome, aesthetic son of a rich Florentine wool merchant, was at sixty-six the oldest. A most fastidious, exquisitely dressed and almost excessively neat dilettante, he had never cared for trade and had exhausted his inherited fortune on a beautiful house and a magnificent collection of books and manuscripts, medals, coins, intaglios, cameos and vases which ‘no distinguished visitor to Florence ever failed to inspect’. He had begun this collection when Cosimo, twenty-five years younger than he, was a child; and, as Cosimo grew up, he had been inspired by it to make a similar collection of his own. They had once planned to go to the Holy Land together in search of Greek manuscripts; but a journey for such a purpose had not commended itself to Giovanni de’ Medici, who had packed off his son into the bank before he caught any other fanciful ideas from Niccolò. For Niccolò’s devotion to classical antiquity was an obsession. He eventually amassed eight hundred books, by far the largest library of his day, and was adding new volumes to his shelves up to the day of his death, selling off land and borrowing money from Cosimo in order to do so. He never wrote a book himself, since he never managed to finish a paragraph that wholly satisfied his exacting taste; but he did develop a cursive script which enabled his scribes to copy out manuscripts quickly, neatly and elegantly and which became the basis for the italic type used by the early Italian printers. He became an object of curiosity to visitors to Florence, who looked out for his dignified figure as he passed gracefully down the street but who were warned that he could be very brusque, ill-tempered and dismissive. The only person of whom he himself appeared to be in awe was his termagant of a mistress whom he had taken over from one of his five brothers, much to the annoyance of the rest of the family. One day two of these brothers, enraged by the girl’s brash ill-temper, bundled her out of the house and gave her a good thrashing.Niccolò, to whose sensitive ears even the’ squeaking of a trapped mouse’ was intolerable, burst into tears at her screams.
    Many of Niccolò’s manuscripts were discovered for him by his friend Poggio Bracciolini, who was to achieve lasting fame as a scholar, orator, essayist, historian, satirist and author of a collection of humorous and indecent tales, the
Facetiae
. Born in a village near Florence in 1380, he was the son of an impoverished apothecary, and came to the city as a boy with only a few coins in his pocket. He contrived to get a place at the Studio Fiorentino, 3 the university which had been founded in 1321 after the Pope’s excommunication of Bologna and which Cosimo, as one of its trustees, had helped to extend by pressing for the employment of professors of moral philosophy, rhetoric and poetry in addition to those already teaching grammar, law, logic, astrology, surgery and medicine. Poggio studied law, entered the guild of notaries and obtained employment as a writer of apostolic letters at the Curia. He went with Pope John XXIII to the Council of Constance and, some years later, accompanied Cosimo on a holiday to Ostia where they made an archaeological study of the area.