A brutal murder, a nefarious plot, a coded
letter. After five hundred years, the most notorious mystery of the
Renaissance is finally solved. The Italian Renaissance
is remembered as much for intrigue as it is for art, with papal
politics and infighting among Italy’s many city-states providing the
grist for Machiavelli’s classic work on take-no-prisoners politics, The Prince.
The attempted assassination of the Medici brothers in the Duomo in
Florence in 1478 is one of the best-known examples of the machinations
endemic to the age. While the assailants were the Medici’s rivals, the
Pazzi family, questions have always lingered about who really
orchestrated the attack, which has come to be known as the Pazzi
Conspiracy.
More than five hundred years later, Marcello
Simonetta, working in a private archive in Italy, stumbled upon a coded
letter written by Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, to Pope
Sixtus IV. Using a codebook written by his own ancestor to crack its
secrets, Simonetta unearthed proof of an all-out power grab by the Pope
for control of Florence. Montefeltro, long believed to be a close
friend of Lorenzo de Medici, was in fact conspiring with the Pope to
unseat the Medici and put the more malleable Pazzi in their place.
In The Montefeltro Conspiracy,
Simonetta unravels this plot, showing not only how the plot came
together but how its failure (only one of the Medici brothers,
Giuliano, was killed; Lorenzo survived) changed the course of Italian
and papal history for generations. In the course of his gripping
narrative, we encounter the period’s most colorful characters, relive
its tumultuous politics, and discover that two famous paintings,
including one in the Sistine Chapel, contain the Medici’s astounding
revenge.