The interest of the two months from late April to late June 1490 lies in the light they throw on Piero’s active involvement in politics, as well as on his more hidden role as Lorenzo’s stand-in, collaborating with the friends in the Otto di Pratica (the all-important foreign affairs magistracy) to ensure that Lorenzo got his way. He already enjoyed a close relationship with Niccolò Michelozzi, the principal secretary who remained in Florence, and neither Michelozzi nor Piero Dovizi (with Lorenzo at the baths) found much to add – they said – to Piero’s letters at this time. Michelozzi only once added a paragraph in his own hand to one of them, and on 9 May he told Lorenzo he was letting Piero communicate with him, since he ‘writes and behaves most diligently, as you have seen’. And Dovizi told Michelozzi that he rarely wrote to him any longer: ‘writing to Piero, as one is doing, there’s very little or nothing to say to you’.1

Although Florence was where Piero lived and where his fate would be decided, he was nevertheless sustained by an extensive web of patronal, as well as banking, relationships that stretched outside Florence into its dominion and beyond, providing Piero with support from clients and supporters that helped to sustain him in his exile with a high price on his head. Through his great-grandmother Contessina, Piero was already in close contact with his Bardi relations in the Mugello and with old feudal families in Pistoia and Siena, and his father took care to nurture his role as patron and boss by introducing him early on to these client networks and teaching him through his own example. Like Lorenzo, Piero was called ‘master of the workshop’ to describe his role as boss – even if neither enjoyed the success of Giovanni di Bicci and Cosimo as bankers. Piero was appointed head of the Medici Bank in Pisa in 1489 (aged seventeen) under the aegis of his manager Giovanni Cambi, and he enjoyed a close relationship with his cousin Nofri Tornabuoni, who became manager of the Medici Bank in Rome, both cities of strategic and cultural importance that must have contributed to his political experience if not to his banking skills.