Book Review: The Duke's Assassin

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The Duke's Assassin:Exile and Death of Lorenzino de' Medici

by Stefano Dall'Aglio

translated from the Italian by Donald Weinstein

Yale University Press, 2015

The two murderous incidents at the heart of Stefano Dall'Aglio's thoroughly engrossing new book The Duke's Assassin (here ably translated by Donald Weinstein, who's no slouch himself when it comes to writing first-rate works of history) have long been considered about as open-and-shut as any murderous incident in history usually gets. In January of 1537, Duke Alessandro de' Medici was lured to an assignation with a beautiful woman named Caterina Soderini, who quickly absented herself from the scene. While Alessandro was lolling on the bed, he was accosted by two men: a thorough brute and well-known subhuman who rejoiced in the knickname of Scoronconcolo and a young man named Lorenzino … de' Medici, kinsman to Alessandro and nephew of the beautiful Soderini woman. Dall'Aglio paints the scene vividly:

A ferocious scuffle followed, presumably not a lengthy one because the defenseless duke was unable effectively to resist two aggressors armed with sword and dagger. “Give me my life!” Alessandro is said to have vainly begged in those few convulsive seconds, spending his last strength in powerfully biting the hand of Lorenzino who was trying to silence him. The struggle ended with Scoronconcolo's lethal knife thrust into the duke's throat, although the blows continued even after he had gasped his last. By then Alessandro had “shed so much blood that it almost flooded the chamber.” Another source provides an additional macabre detail: as they finished their work, the assassins “began to joke and laugh together, remaining there for more than three hours.”

After they were done playing around with the Duke's corpse, the two men fled Florence, which put a price on Lorenzino's head so enormous and elaborate that there was no real chance he could evade it. What's amazing is how long he lasted, but sure enough, eleven years later, in February of 1548, Lorenzino was knifed to death by paid assassins in Venice, thus ending the foreign wandering career of the “Tuscan Brutus.”In tracing the “red thread” between these two murders, Dall'Aglio hopes to “purge the historical record of the quarrels and distortions that have accumulated and to free it from the exaggerated praises of a 'Lorenzo de' Medici the Second Brutus,' on the one hand, and the ferocious criticisms of 'the wicked and cruel parricide', on the other.” Toward this end he's done a large amount of research in a wide array of forbidding places like the Biblioteca Nacional de Espana, the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, and the Archivo General de Simancas – and many other civic archives. By his own admission, he's not trying to overturn the settled verdicts of history; he just wants to broaden and deepen the picture, especially its account of Lorenzino himself.

This is a relief, and his book is enormously successful at it. By using a wide array of new or newly-interpreted documents (and by a strong and canny reading of the contemporary account written by Benedetto Varchi based on the testimonies of both Lorenzino and Scoronconcolo), Dall'Aglio is able to construct a richer picture of the eleven years Lorenzino spent in exile than has ever been done before in English. The scheming world of well-heeled Florentine exiles, the double-dealing of continental agents, and the Big Picture scheming of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V are skillfully and concisely dramatized, and thankfully little effort is made to rehabilitate the reputation of the slain Duke Alessandro, a libertine moron historian G. F. Young described as “uneducated, vicious, and universally detested.” If anything, our author's reassessments are all on the side of the assassin, who comes off better in this book, predictably enough, than anybody else:

Lorenzino's death was far more important than the passing of a single individual; it meant the loss of a standard-bearer for the cause of liberty and anti-tyranny, consigning to the tomb the remains of the dream that his action of 1537 had revived. Charles V, who had wanted him dead, knew this. The exiles knew it as well; they did not want the two assassins, who, perhaps unawares, had stifled one of the last breaths of Florentine republican liberty, to go unpunished.

Aficionados of the tangled affairs of Italian Renaissance history shouldn't miss The Duke's Assassin (decked out with a detail from Guiseppe Bellucci's wonderfully melodramatic painting of the incident in question). Stefan Dall' Aglio has a marked gift for bringing all these bloody old thrashings alive and reminding us of their importance.