The Estates General of 1484 laid out a clear statement of commonwealth principles, largely followed by Charles VIII and Louis XII. Francis I, however, set out to undermine these commonwealth elements. With the Concordat of Bologna (1516), he gained the right to name successors to most French benefices, a tool kings would use as their most effective patronage weapon. The institutional thickening under Francis I and Henry II transformed the meaning of many traditional phrases. The regional noble elite and the legal hierarchy, led by the Parlements, developed mutually contradictory understandings of the “commonwealth” element of the monarchy. By the time of the Estates General of 1560, local elites wanted a codified return to a commonwealth whose principles had been effectively abandoned.At the Estates General of Orléans (1560–1561), they would lay out clearly a system built on elections: of bishops, abbots, priors, noble baillis, judges, town governments, and deputies to periodic meetings of bailiwick and national estates. The central judicial elite and the monarchy made sure this system never became operative. Together, the monarchy and the central judicial elite would develop a political vocabulary built around the “good of the State.”

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.