In the piazza below, Jacopo de’ Pazzi, head of the family, has taken up position with a small army. He shouts, “Popolo e liberta!” (People and freedom!)—the traditional call to arms against tyrannical government in an attempt to get the mob onside. But his cry falls on deaf ears. More effective is another speech that Lorenzo de’ Medici is giving from his palace balcony across the city. He confirms that he’s been attacked and his brother murdered, but urges for calm, pleading with the mob not to take justice into their own hands. The mob—as mobs tend to do—end up doing the exact opposite.
There’s no delay in dealing with the conspirators. Francesco is hunted down and dragged, still bleeding from his self-inflicted wound, from his bed to the Signoria where he’s stripped naked, a noose is tied around his neck, and he’s thrown from the window, left swinging above the jeering mob below. Next is Salviati. But the fall doesn’t kill him. Wild-eyed and writhing he spends his desperate final moments trying to swing himself over to the dangling corpse of Francesco de’ Pazzi, frantically biting into it in a hopeless attempt to get purchase. Bernardo Baroncelli will follow soon after.
Jacopo de’ Pazzi doesn’t stick around to watch his nephew sway from the palace’s window. After failing to win over the mob he realizes the battle is lost and makes a break for the city gate. He manages to escape, but just a few days into his self-imposed exile he’s recognized, arrested and brought back to Florence. After being tortured, he’s executed in the same manner as the other conspirators: stripped naked and hanged from the window. What happened to his body post mortem, however, differed drastically.
Initially interred in the Basilica of Santa Croce, his corpse is dug up by Medici supporters, intent on getting revenge and bringing definition to the term “overkill”. They drag his body through the city, bruising it beyond recognition on its cobbled streets, before cutting his head off and using it as a doorknocker at the Pazzi family’s palace. Eventually, it’s thrown into the Arno where it’s left to decompose in the river’s filthy waters.
But this isn’t the end. Local children then fish Jacopo’s corpse out, sling it over the branch of a willow tree and flog it before finally throwing it (or, by this stage what was left of it) back into the river. Though in less of a bloody and brutal way, the Pazzi family suffered the same fate as its patriarch’s corpse: annihilation. Among the 80 or so people hunted down and killed in the aftermath of the conspiracy, many were from the Pazzi family. Those who aren’t killed flee for their lives, banished forever from their city of Florence.
The failure of the Pazzi Conspiracy had deeper ramifications for the Cradle of the Renaissance. The Papacy’s backing of the Pazzi family would ultimately lead to a war between the Medici and the Popes, almost crippling Florence financially. But, ironically for the conspirators, what was meant to bring about the end of the Medici ended up ensuring more than just their survival but their flourishing under Lorenzo and his successors. For not only had they managed to rid themselves of their most dangerous enemies, but they’d also proven their popularity as the people of Florence, when the choice came, had chosen their ruler.