Cosimo de' Medici

← Encyclopedia

The Medici bank kept its books in florins, and for a generation the most profitable ledger in Christendom ran through a single Florentine house. Cosimo de’ Medici inherited that house from his father Giovanni di Bicci, expanded its branches from London to the Levant, and made it the principal banker to the papal Curia. Out of those returns came a second account, harder to balance and never meant to balance: the manuscripts bought, the scholars kept, the churches and libraries and villas raised. He was a banker who governed a republic and spent its surplus on the recovery of antiquity. The most consequential entry he ever made in that second account was a verbal one — an instruction, late in life, about which book a young translator should render into Latin first.

The first citizen

Cosimo was born in Florence in 1389 and died there in 1464. He held no crown, no dukedom, no permanent magistracy answerable to no one; Florence remained, in its constitutional forms, a republic of councils, priors, and a gonfaloniere who served for two months at a time. What Cosimo possessed was money, a network of obligation woven through marriages and loans and offices, and a gift for governing from behind the scaffolding of those forms rather than above them. After the failure of the oligarchic faction that had exiled him in 1433, he returned in 1434 and from that year was the leading citizen of the city — arranging elections through the scrutiny lists, financing the policies he favored, and ruling, in the standard phrase of the historians, de facto. The title that fixed his standing was conferred only after his death: by public decree the Florentines inscribed pater patriae, father of the country, on his tomb in the church of San Lorenzo, the basilica his family had rebuilt. The formula was Roman, borrowed from the honors voted to Cicero and to Augustus, and it named precisely the paradox of his power — a private man treated as the parent of a commonwealth he never formally headed.

His expenditure on learning was deliberate and large. He funded the reconstruction of San Marco and gave its convent a public library, the first of its kind in Europe, stocked with the books gathered by the humanist book-hunter Niccolò Niccoli, whose collection Cosimo acquired and dispersed for common use. He employed copyists and agents to seek out Greek and Latin texts across the failing Byzantine world and the monasteries of the West. He paid for the building of the Badia at Fiesole and its library, for the rebuilding of San Lorenzo, for the family palace on the Via Larga. And he attached to his household a circle of scholars whose work he directed as a patron directs — by choosing what should be done, and underwriting the doing of it.

The Greek philosophers and a Florentine boy

The recovery of Greek thought in fifteenth-century Florence had an occasion as well as a cause. In 1439 the Council of Ferrara-Florence, convened to negotiate union between the Latin and Greek churches, brought to the city a delegation of Byzantine scholars, among them the aged Platonist Georgios Gemistos, called Plethon, who lectured on the differences between Plato and Aristotle and, in the telling of later tradition, kindled in Cosimo the ambition to see Plato’s dialogues restored to the Latin West. That ambition needed a translator. Cosimo found one in the son of his own physician: Marsilio Ficino, born in 1433, whom he took up, educated in Greek, and eventually settled at a villa at Careggi in the Florentine hills. Ficino was meant to render the complete Plato — and in time he did, producing the Latin version that gave Renaissance Europe its Neoplatonism, its Plotinus, and its doctrine of the One from which all things proceed and to which they return.

The scholarly company that gathered around Ficino at Careggi under Medici support has come down to later tradition as the “Platonic Academy” of Florence, a deliberate revival of Plato’s school in Athens. The phrase should be handled with care. It suggests a chartered institution — statutes, members, a continuous corporate life — and the evidence supports nothing so formal. What existed was an informal circle: friends and correspondents reading and discussing Plato, a shared cult of the prisca theologia, banquets staged in imitation of the ancient symposium, a villa where the conversation happened. The “Academy” was magnified by Ficino’s own rhetoric and by the affectionate memory of those who came after; historians now treat it as a fellowship rather than a foundation. The patronage that sustained the fellowship, however, is not in doubt, and neither is the single decision that fellowship’s most famous member recorded.

The book that came before Plato

Around 1460 a manuscript reached Florence that altered the order of Ficino’s labors. It was a Greek codex of the Corpus Hermeticum — the philosophical and religious treatises ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, Thrice-Greatest Hermes — carrying the first fourteen of the tractates. A Medici agent, the monk Leonardo da Pistoia, had brought it from Macedonia, one acquisition among the many Cosimo’s collectors were extracting from the Greek East as Byzantium collapsed toward the fall of Constantinople. The codex is preserved still, as Laurentianus Plut. 71.33 in the Medici library; it is the direct ancestor of the Latin Hermetica.

Ficino later recorded what happened next, in the preface to his translation. Cosimo, near the end of his life, instructed him to set the dialogues of Plato aside and translate the Hermetic books first. The young scholar obeyed. Working through the winter, he completed the Latin version in April 1463, the year before Cosimo died — a slim book he titled Liber de potestate et sapientia Dei, the Book of the Power and Wisdom of God, dedicated to Cosimo as patriae pater. By metonymy from the opening tractate, in which the divine mind Poimandres reveals the cosmos to Hermes, the whole came to be known as the Pimander. The complete Plato followed only afterward, the translation finished in the years after Cosimo’s death. An editio princeps of the Hermetic version was printed at Treviso on 18 December 1471, without Ficino’s authorization; more than forty manuscripts and two dozen further editions circulated before the century turned. The channel had opened.

Why Hermes came first

To translate Hermes before Plato was not a whim. It followed, with perfect logic, from what Cosimo and Ficino held the texts to be. On the chronology they inherited from the Church Fathers — from Lactantius, who quoted Hermes as a pagan witness to Christian truth, and from Augustine, who knew the Asclepius and recoiled from its account of god-making — Hermes Trismegistus was an ancient Egyptian sage, a contemporary or near-contemporary of Moses, the fountainhead of a wisdom older than the Greek philosophers. In Ficino’s preface and in the Argumentum he prefixed to the translation, Hermes stands first in a genealogy of inspired teachers: from him the light passes to Orpheus, to Aglaophemus, to Pythagoras, to Philolaus, and at last to Plato. This is the doctrine of the prisca theologia, the ancient theology — the conviction that a single primordial revelation, given to the gentiles in parallel with the revelation given to Israel, had descended through a chain of sages and converged, in the end, upon Christianity.

On that understanding, to begin with Hermes was to begin at the headwaters. Plato became a tributary of an Egyptian source; the Pimander became something close to scripture, a pagan testament confirming the truths of the faith from outside it. This is why a dying patron, who had waited years for his Plato, would call for the Egyptian first. He believed he was reaching past the philosopher to the prophet behind the philosopher.

The chronology was wrong — not fraudulently, but by an honest error of dating that the whole of Latin Christendom had carried for more than a millennium. The philosophical Hermetica are not the remains of pre-Mosaic Egypt. They are Greek compositions of Roman Egypt, written in the first centuries of the Common Era by authors steeped in Middle Platonic and Stoic vocabulary, with traces of the Septuagint and the language of the Johannine prologue. Their “Egypt” is a literary idiom, not a date. The teacher Hermes Trismegistus is himself a composite — the Greek Hermes fused under Ptolemaic rule with the Egyptian scribe-god Thoth, the “thrice-great” of late temple inscriptions. The error did Cosimo’s project no harm in its own century; the antiquity that gave his instruction its urgency was believed in Florence for a hundred and fifty years, and on the strength of that belief the Latin Hermetica entered European thought as venerable wisdom and went to work.

What the channel carried

The consequences ran far beyond the villa at Careggi. Ficino’s own later work folded the Hermetic material into a program of astral magic — a medicine of the soul that drew down the benign influences of the planets through music, images, and the qualities of things, justified by appeal to the cosmic sympathies the Hermetic and Neoplatonic texts described. The Egyptian sage who had spoken first became a license for a Christian magus to act upon the cosmos. The next generation pressed the inheritance further. Lodovico Lazzarelli completed the Latin corpus, translating the tractates Ficino’s manuscript had lacked, and read the Hermetic rebirth as a literal regeneration of the soul. Later in the century the prophet Giovanni “Mercurio” da Correggio carried a Hermetic gospel through the streets of Rome. In the next century Francesco Patrizi printed a new edition of the Hermetica and proposed, to a pope, that this prisca theologia replace Aristotle in the schools of the Church; and Giordano Bruno turned the Egyptian religion lamented in the Asclepius into the banner of a cosmic and heretical reform that ended at the stake in 1600. None of this would have taken the shape it did without a Latin Hermetica to read, and there was a Latin Hermetica to read because Cosimo had ordered it made.

Scholarship, dating, and the texts

The single most important later act in this history was a work of philology. In 1614 the Calvinist scholar Isaac Casaubon, working in London under a commission from James I to refute the Catholic ecclesiastical history of Cardinal Baronio, demonstrated in his De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI that the Greek of the Corpus Hermeticum is late: saturated with post-classical and Septuagintal vocabulary, echoing Christian phrasing, citing things no pre-Mosaic Egyptian could have known. He relocated the texts to the post-apostolic centuries, broadly the second and third CE — the dating modern critical scholarship has refined but not overturned. The case is reconstructed in Anthony Grafton’s Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46, 1983, 78–93), which shows that Casaubon’s redating was the culmination of a half-century of prior Protestant philological doubt rather than a single overnight stroke; Martin Mulsow’s edited Das Ende des Hermetismus (Mohr Siebeck, 2002) documents that longer arc from Genebrard in 1567 forward. Crucially, the redating fixed the date of the surviving Greek texts, not the worth of their teaching, and the Hermetic current ran on through Rosicrucianism, the Cambridge Platonists, and the later occult revivals undamaged.

The standard modern scholarly access to the texts themselves is Brian Copenhaver’s Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1992), built on the critical Greek text of the Budé edition of A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière (Les Belles Lettres, 4 vols., 1945–54); Garth Fowden’s The Egyptian Hermes (Princeton, 1986) and Florian Ebeling’s The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus (Cornell, 2007) carry the historical and reception narrative. On Ficino’s own preface and the portrait of Hermes it constructed, the open-access study Classical and Christian Auctoritas in Marsilio Ficino’s Preface to the Corpus Hermeticum (Clotho, University of Ljubljana) sets out how Ficino marshaled Cicero, Lactantius, and Augustine to seat Hermes at the head of the ancient theology. Maurizio Campanelli’s 2011 critical edition of Ficino’s Latin translation has since shown how corrupt the 1471 Pimander was and how imperfectly Ficino grasped parts of the Greek — an argument Wouter Hanegraaff pressed in his Esotericism and the Academy (Cambridge, 2012) and in How Hermetic Was Renaissance Hermetism?, recasting the Florentine event as a Renaissance discourse about Hermes rather than a continuous Hermetic tradition. The grand framing that bracketed a unified “Hermetic Tradition” between Ficino’s 1463 translation and Casaubon’s 1614 redating belongs to Frances Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago, 1964) — canonical as a recovery, substantially revised in its boldest causal claims by Vickers, Copenhaver, and Hanegraaff. The site’s library holds G. R. S. Mead’s English version of the Corpus Hermeticum, John Everard’s seventeenth-century Divine Pymander, and Benjamin Jowett’s Dialogues of Plato — the two streams Cosimo set running, now flowing side by side.

The patron’s measure

It would overstate the case to make Cosimo a philosopher. He read the texts he paid to have made, kept Ficino’s company, and died, by one account, with a treatise of his protégé being read aloud to him; but the thinking was Ficino’s, the Greek was Ficino’s, the doctrine of the ancient theology was Ficino’s elaboration of Byzantine and patristic materials. Cosimo’s contribution was the decision and the means — the choice of what should be done, and the wealth that made the doing possible. That is the work of a patron, and it is exactly the work that mattered. A library can hold a manuscript for centuries and change nothing; it took a man with the authority to redirect a scholar’s labor, and the timing of a deathbed, to turn one Greek codex from Macedonia into the first chapter of European Hermetism. The florins were spent; the Pimander was made; what Cosimo had taken to be the oldest wisdom in the world entered Latin at his command, and the century that followed read it in the order he had set.

→ In the library: Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres · The Dialogues of Plato (Jowett, 1892) · The Divine Pymander (Everard, 1650)

→ Related: Marsilio Ficino · Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism · The One · Corpus Hermeticum · Plato · Prisca Theologia · Isaac Casaubon · Giordano Bruno · Francesco Patrizi · Lodovico Lazzarelli · Renaissance Astro Magic · Asclepius