18 - The Last Years, 1498–1503

Summary

As Bernardo Dovizi had said, as long as there was fighting in Italy, Piero was not without hope. So although the new year, 1498, opened with Piero enjoying ‘little reputation and less credit’, renewed fighting in Italy kept his hopes alive for the remaining years of his life.¹ Two events helped to change the political scene, principally the succession of Louis of Orleans to the French throne in April, but also the execution of Savonarola the following month. With claims on Milan as well as Naples, King Louis XII forged new alliances in Italy, most notably with Venice and Pope Alexander VI, who used France to further his son Cesare Borgia’s attempts to build a state for himself in central Italy. The destabilisation they created encouraged Piero’s military adventurism, while the final unravelling of Savonarola’s life – his attack on the pope, his last defiant sermons and the aborted Trial by Fire in March and early April 1498 – also helped to revivify Piero by discrediting the Florentine government at home and abroad.² So Piero’s little-known movements in these years provide a novel outside-in view of Florence’s crisis that helps to explain the threatened coup d’état in 1500 and the life Gonfaloniership two years later.