Pazzi Conspiracy

Conclusion

As far as this story goes, that of the Pazzi Conspiracy, we have seen to what extent family and city were intertwined. This was true elsewhere, not only in Florence and not only in Italy, but it was perhaps most characteristic in northern Italy, and the events surrounding this conspiracy serve to illustrate this in high relief. Honor, family, loyalty, justice, public peace, foreign policy, religion, and even commerce, all these were part of the same cloth wrapped around the shoulders of those who ruled. The events are not impossible to explain in terms purely political or purely religious or purely personal or purely economic, but such an explanation is limited to the point of being cartoonish.

Not all of our studies this semester will be quite so dramatic, nor quite so gory. But they will all be composed of multiple threads in multiple colors, and our job as historians is to weave them into a comprehensible picture that can be understood by others. It's no easy task. The historian must be detective one moment, scientist the next, and poet after that. We usually fail to do justice to our subject, but we try. That's why we get so irritated by the simple explanations, the monochromatic picture, the one-note song.

Poor Giuliano, stabbed to death in the cathedral of Florence, 26 April 1478 deserves better than that.