April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici [Hardcover]

One April Sunday in 1478, assassins-with the support of a member of the Pazzi, one of Florence's leading families-killed a member of the ruling family of Florence, Giuliano de Medici, and wounded his brother, Lorenzo. In the hands of Martines, a professor emeritus of European history at UCLA, the rebellion and Lorenzo's ensuing crackdown becomes a prism through which to view Renaissance Florence. He details the many people involved, from bankers to the king of Naples and even Pope Sixtus. Long seen as a "Renaissance man," Lorenzo was a poet and a patron of the arts. But Martines turns the story on its head. He sees the plot as a reaction to the corruption in Medici rule and the crackdown-which included hangings and prohibitions against marrying female members of the Pazzi family-as overly harsh: "[I]t required war or a successful act of terrorism to overthrow Lorenzo, his cronies, and his creatures." While the crackdown temporarily saved the Medici rule, Martines argues that Lorenzo's ruthlessness eventually turned much of Florence against his family and foretold the end of Medici rule in the city. During the past few decades, historians have increasingly placed social, cultural and women's history at the center of European history. But not here. Drawing upon a lifetime of scholarship, Martines has created a book that places governmental politics at Renaissance Florence's center. And along the way, he has written a book as lively as its subject.
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"This finely wrought account, combining the power of a broad brush with the delicacy of intricate detail, will remain the standard against which all other works on the topic will be judged."--Renaissance Quarterly

"An intriguing book.... Every situation and character Martines presents to us in April Blood is of marvelous complexity: he writes of the learned Pope turned feverish nepotist, the hardened mercenary who will not kill in church, the lucid Lorenzo, who hates the Church's nepotism and yet does everything he can to get his son made a cardinal; then we have the general picture of a religious age in love with transgression, of a republican citizenry avid for the trappings of hierarchy.... The exhilaration and humiliation of a fake democracy, at once so relevant to the modern world and so difficult to pin down, is the real subject of April Blood and the key to understanding the Pazzi conspiracy."--Tim Page, The New York Review of Books

"In April Blood, one can follow the Renaissance plot to murder Lorenzo de Medici...like one of those works of true-crime reporting that frequently make the best-seller list.... This is just the sort of historical mystery that should appeal to fans of, say, Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning (about the murder of Christopher Marlowe) or Josephine Tey's classic The Daughter of Time, in which her fictional detective reopens the case of Richard III's involvement in the murder of the princes in the Tower."--Washington Post

"Fascinating.... Martines is a master researcher and, like a collector showing off his treasures, his delight in his findings sparkles on every page. The chapter on marriage alone is worth the price of the book (Lorenzo was the champion marriage broker of his day)."--Philadelphia Inquirer

"Elegant and insightful."--Library Journal

"A finely researched picture of Florentine life dominated by politics and business rather than by the arts. For tourist and scholar alike, it renders that city, at once so radiant and so grim, in a larger whole."--Colin Walters, Washington Times

"A spine-chilling political drama of conspiracy, murder at High Mass, and bloody revenge; of men split on the wheel from groin to neck, of soldiers biting into the hearts they have torn from the warm dead and mobs who tear the freshly executed limb from limb; of priests tortured until fat dripped from their feet, of corpses of great men being dragged by taunting urchins through some of the most exquisite and sophisticated cities on Earth, while their solid citizens poke sticks into the putrefying flesh. It tells of a Pope, Sixtus IV, esteemed for his piety and learning, who out of purblind nepotism stoops to assassination, of an Archbishop prepared to build his career on murder, who, at the moment of being hanged, is seen by petrified spectators below to sink his teeth deep into the naked breast of the patrician co-conspirator swinging beside him--this, in the Florence of Lorenzo de' Medici."--The Times (London) [more below]

"What makes April Blood as compelling as it is unsettling is its broader canvas, brilliantly illuminated, of the foul consequences of the constant power struggles for place and patronage among men we are more accustomed to think of as paragons of high culture, statesmanship and civilised discourse. Lauro Martines has written a riveting historical thriller that wears great scholarship lightly; but as he probes the rumbling political underbelly of the Italian Renaissance, there is nothing light about the subversiveness of his intent."--The Times (London)

"His debunking of the overly sunny, refulgently cultured 'Florence of the Renaissance' is long overdue. This portrait of Renaissance Florence is a good deal darker and more menacing than most; but, with its shadows and chiaroscuro, it is a picture that seems convincingly real."--John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph

"Elegant and incisive.... Posing the classic 'what if?' question, Martines concludes that the longer term interests of Florentine republicanism might have been better served if the charismatic Lorenzo had indeed been killed on that April morning."--The Sunday Times