You're under the Duomo — Santa Maria del Fiore, the great striped cathedral with the brick-red dome. Fix your eyes on the wide floor beneath that dome, the open space under the lantern where the altar sits. On a Sunday morning in the spring of fourteen seventy-eight, that floor became the most famous crime scene in Florence.
The two most powerful men in the city were the Medici brothers. Lorenzo, twenty-nine, already running Florence from behind the curtain. And his younger brother Giuliano — handsome, popular, twenty-five. A rival banking family, the Pazzi, wanted them both dead. And the Pazzi were not working alone. Behind them stood the Archbishop of Pisa. And behind the archbishop stood the Pope himself, Sixtus the Fourth, who had moved the papal bank account away from the Medici and had every reason to want them gone.
The Pope's official position was a small masterpiece of having it both ways. Remove the Medici from power, yes. But — and he was very firm about this — without any
one actually being killed. As though you could unseat the two most heavily guarded men in Florence by asking them nicely to leave.
Why would a Pope want the two richest bankers in Florence dead? Money, mostly. The Medici had been the papal bank for years — they handled the Church's fortune across Europe — and Sixtus the Fourth had fallen out with them hard, yanked his account, handed it to the Pa
