ity, and performing the hospitalities of the
republic like men who had been born to represent its dignities.
Lorenzo's marriage to Clarice Orsini, of the noble Roman house, was
another sign that the Medici were advancing on the way toward
despotism. Cosimo had avoided foreign alliances for his children. His
descendants now judged themselves firmly planted enough to risk the
odium of a princely match for the sake of the support outside the city
they might win.

XII

Piero de' Medici died in December 1469. His son Lorenzo was then
barely twenty-two years of age. The chiefs of the Medicean party,
all-powerful in the State, held a council, in which they resolved to
place him in the same position as his father and grandfather. This
resolve seems to have been formed after mature deliberation, on the
ground that the existing conditions of Italian politics rendered it
impossible to conduct the government without a presidential head.
Florence, though still a democracy, required a permanent chief to
treat on an equality with the princes of the leading cities. Here we
may note the prudence of Cosimo's foreign policy. When he helped to
establish despots in Milan and Bologna he was rendering the presidency
of his own family in Florence necessary.

Lorenzo, having received this invitation, called attention to his
youth and inexperience. Yet he did not refuse it; and, after a
graceful display of diffidence, he accepted the charge, entering thus
upon that famous political career, in the course of which he not only
established and maintained a balance of power in Italy, with Florence
for the central city, but also contrived to remodel the government of
the republic in the interest of his own family and to strengthen the
Medici by relations with the Papal See.

The extraordinary versatility of this man's intellectual and social
gifts, his participation in all the literary and philosophical
interests of his century, his large and liberal patronage of art, and
the gaiety with which he joined the people of Florence in their
pastimes--Mayday games and Carnival festivities--strengthened his hold
upon the city in an age devoted to culture and refined pleasure.
Whatever was most brilliant in the spirit of the Italian Benaissance
seemed to be incarnate in Lorenzo. Not merely as a patron and a
dilettante, but as a poet and a critic, a philosopher and scholar, he
proved himself adequate to the varied intellectual ambitions of his
count