LORENZO DE’ MEDICI VOL. I. LORENZO DE’ MEDICI _THE MAGNIFICENT_ BY ALFRED VON REUMONT _TRANSLATED from THE GERMAN by ROBERT HARRISON_ IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I. LONDON SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 1876 [_All rights reserved_] TO CINO CAPPONI THE HISTORIAN OF HIS NATIVE CITY WITH RESPECTFUL HOMAGE AND FRIENDSHIP NOTE BY THE TRANSLATOR. I AM bound to confess that it has been no easy task to interpret for English readers the admirable biography of Lorenzo which Herr von Reumont has given to the world. His extraordinary talent for research seems to have spent itself freely over every scrap of paper or parchment written or printed on the subject of the Medici and their times that has come within his reach. If these volumes convey to their readers the vivid impression of the Medicean age which may be derived from the original work my humble but laborious duty will not have been undertaken in vain. R. H. LONDON LIBRARY: _June 1876_. AUTHOR’S PREFACE. THE second half of the fifteenth century exhibits, in the development of the Renaissance in Italy, the singular spectacle of a transformation of the modern world under the influence of ancient classical culture in conjunction with the opening out of a new intellectual horizon. In a state the importance of which cannot be measured by its circumference or material strength, we see a struggle between form and spirit among a community that had stood there alone from the Middle Ages. This struggle was the exciting cause of a new growth, of the production of fresh branches and new foliage on a tree that had become incurably rotten and hollow. The Christian world has only once taken up a position like this in the fruitful interpenetration and transmutation of real and ideal elements. It shows us a man, the product and consummation of these circumstances and conditions, at once the child and the pioneer of his age, an age which was filled with the most joyous and elevated existence both in material and spiritual things. A man like him could only be born and grow up under such circumstances, in the ferment and strife of events and of the moral forces of the time. Family and civic influence as well as the temper of the people and of the century contributed to this result.