On a Sunday in April 1478, assassins attacked Lorenzo and his brother as they attended Mass in the cathedral in Florence. Lorenzo scrambled to safety as Giuliano bled to death on the cathedral floor. The conspiracy was led by one of the city’s most noble clans, the Pazzi, financiers who feared and resented the Medici’s swaggering new role as political bosses-but the web of intrigue spread through all of Italy. Bankers, mercenaries, the Duke of Urbino, the King of Naples and Pope Sixtus IV entered secretly into the plot. Florence was plunged into a peninsula war, and Lorenzo was soon fighting for his own and his family’s survival.
The failed assassination doomed the Pazzi. Medici revenge was swift and brutal - plotters were hanged or beheaded, innocents were hacked to pieces, and bodies were put out to dangle from the windows of the government palace. All remaining members of the Pazzi clan were forced to change their surname, and every public sign or symbol of the family were destroyed.
