The Montefeltro Conspiracy: A Renaissance Mystery Decoded » (Bargain)

MARCELLO SIMONETTA, Ph. D., received his doctorate in Renaissance Studies from Yale and has taught at Wesleyan University. He has been featured on The History Channel, and in 2007 he curated an exhibition on Federico da Montefeltro’s library at the Morgan Library & Museum. He lives in New York.

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 tumultuouspolitics, and discover that two famous paintings, including one in the Sistine Chapel, contain the Medici’s astounding revenge.

The Washington Post - David I. Kertzer

This is a fascinating tale of historical detective work

Pt. I Winter 1476-Spring 1478

1 Milan Is for Murder 9

2 Overly Cautious 24

3 Nothing Unsaid 41

4 The Invisible Hands 57

5 Eliminate Them 81

Pt. II Spring 1478-Summer 1482

6 Florence Is for Fear 105

7 Extreme Measures 123

8 Lives at Stake 141

9 Traveling South 156

10 Resting in Peace 174

Pt. III The Sistine Chapel and Botticelli's Spring

11 Ominous Ends 189

Afterword 213

Acknowledgments 216

Sources 217

Notes 220

Other Sources 235

Illustration Credits 239

Index 241