Florence, April 26, 1478
Giuliano de Medici was stabbed nineteen times in the Cathedral this morning during High Mass. Lorenzo escaped, barely, through the sacristy. The signal for the attack was the elevation of the host. They used the consecrated moment. They always use what is most sacred as the hinge of their violence.
I was in the piazza when the killers came out. I saw Francesco Salviati, the Archbishop of Pisa, moving toward the Palazzo della Signoria to take the government while the Pazzi family took the city. I watched it with the specific coldness of someone who has read enough history to recognize each step as it happens. The Church funded this. The Pope blessed it. Lorenzo de Medici had become inconvenient and they decided to remove him in the house of God on the holiest day of the week, and they called it justice.
It is not justice. I know what justice looks like and it is not this.
Lorenzo will survive. He will emerge from the sacristy and he will put this city back together and he will punish the men responsible with a thoroughness that will itself be called by some an atrocity. He is twenty-nine years old. He is not a saint. But he is a man who builds things, and the men who just tried to kill him build nothing except the mechanisms of power.
I am twenty years old by the calendar. I have not been safe here since Rinaldo called me damned. Today I watched what the men who call others damned are capable of when given the occasion. I am filing this away. I will not forget it.