If the news Piero had received from Ricci and Lodovico Sforza in the summer of 1493 of Charles VIII’s threatened invasion of Italy was a bombshell, he received a second one, and one much closer to home, the following October when his cousins Lorenzo and Giovanni di Pierfrancesco were appointed French officials.1 A few weeks earlier, Piero Soderini had told Gentile Becchi, his fellow ambassador in France – alluding to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco’s emblem of a coiled snake – ‘this viper has its tail in Florence, and he’s not going to give it to you’.2 The brothers’ appointment was the first open challenge to Piero’s power and it provides the subtext of his downfall.

The pope’s support for the new king of Naples in the ‘agreement, alliance and pact’ signed in Rome on 28 March 1494 changed the balance of power in Italy – and with it, Piero’s importance as a mediator. It had been the pope’s long years of conflict with his recalcitrant vassal Ferrante that had enabled Lorenzo de’ Medici to mediate between Italy’s rulers as the needle of the balance, but the new alignment meant that Piero had lost his father’s role, and once the French expedition was confirmed, the months of temporising were also over. But Lorenzo had not called Piero his ‘warrior son’ for nothing, and when the war was decided on, he entered energetically into its planning, offering forth ideas as his father used to do, who liked to share his fantasies or ghiribizzi with his colleagues as a form of thinking aloud.1 So although the events of the next few months are well known in outline, Piero’s own role – which, as usual, combined bursts of action with periods of inaction or escape – is less familiar.2