Paolo del Rosso tortured to reveal plot to murder Cosimo de’ Medici

After Paolo del Rosso’s forced return to Florence, where he was paraded in chains through the streets, he was interrogated by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici’s officers over two long sessions (July 3 and 7, 1553) “freely, without intimidation and torture”. He made what appears to be a full disclosure of everything he knew and was involved in (at least, so he claimed), implicating the Strozzi and many others – in substance, a conspiracy to send Alessandro Gherardi to Florence to poison De’ Medici. Gherardi managed to escape from Florentine captivity by an epic dash through the city’s sewers.

The poison, in liquid form, meant to kill De’ Medici had already been prepared and stored in two glass phials- Giovanni Bonello

If Del Rosso thought that by making a clean breast of it he would avoid torture, he miscalculated badly. His apparently thorough and voluntary confession did not quite satisfy the examiners. To make doubly sure he was not keeping anything back, they decided they might as well throw at him what physical torture they could think of – and he then suffered the most barbaric torments at the hands of De’ Medici’s security services.

Investigating officers then routinely em­ployed torture to punish the enemy and to extract confessions and information – in this case they wanted more details about the Strozzis’ assassination plot, its extent and its supporters. The irony is that, in the long run, De’ Medici’s police obtained far more information by their initial well-mannered questioning than by the subsequent use of torture.

We are fortunate (if that inappropriate word may be excused) in having a first-hand and detailed account of Del Rosso’s sufferings inflicted by his tormentors. The head investigator, Lorenzo Pagni, the duke’s secretary, felt he had to keep De’ Medici updated with his efforts to extract more and more damning information from Del Rosso. With bureaucratic pedantry Pagni lists the agonies he made him suffer. These he classified under the four classical humours of the body, as taught by medicine at the time: air, water, fire and earth, a classification clearly relevant to Renaissance physiology but one that I had never before seen applied to torture.

Given this report’s absolute rarity, if not uniqueness (it even escaped Del Rosso’s modern biographer), I believe it would be useful to transcribe and translate the contents of what is, after all, a highly clinical document (dated October 29, 1553 – three months after Del Rosso’s full confessions) written with almost professional detachment. “Messer Jacopo Polverino and I have administered the water torture to Paolo del Rosso extensively; in spite of this he has so far confessed nothing of any importance, except that he asserts with certainty that Roberto Strozzi (brother of Piero and Fra Leone) wanted to make use of Galeazzo Taddei (who owed him money) to kill those two from Volterra who had killed Lorenzo (Lorenzino of Pierfrancesco) de’ Medici (the assassin of Duke Alessandro, in turn murdered in Venice on Cosimo’s instructions by two assassins in 1548. The Strozzi were working on Galeazzo Taddei to murder the two assassins). Paolo says that Roberto was expecting a lot from this Taddei and that Roberto had taken Taddei under his control.

“Returning to Paolo del Rosso, I do not believe, from what I see of him, that he now thinks of anything else except of dying. We will be proceeding with the fire torment, as we have already tried on him those of the air and of water – that is, hanging him suspended in the air by a rope, and water, which we have forced down his throat, and then we will only be left with that of the earth, which in the end must receive him.

“I do not want to omit to record that here he is virtually naked, wearing on his shirt a torn waistcoat made of black silk, a pair of socks in shreds, and a mantle of linen in very poor condition, which has nothing proper about it except the white cross. He seems to be suffering the cold intensely. I do not feel well because of my inflamed kidneys that make me pass blood through my penis every two or three days and often give me fevers”.

Even during his torture, Del Rosso wore the black mantle with the Order’s eight-pointed cross in white linen.

The torture sessions recorded in the October report were not the only ones suffered by Del Rosso. In a previous procés verbal, more torments are already mentioned. Following Del Rosso’s early spontaneous statements, “having been tortured with various torments and several times, he never confessed anything else”.

Like the Medici, the Strozzi never wavered in their almost religious faith in assassination as the ultimate solution to any political or personal dispute. Fra Leone Strozzi, the almost-but-not-quite Grand Master of Malta, besides the Medici, loathed Andrea Doria, the renowned Genoese admiral and a great personal friend of Grand Master de Valette (they had their joint portrait painted). Leone Strozzi conceived an ingenious, and spectacular plan to have his rival murdered on the Genoese flagship when both Doria and the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand I, King of Bohemia, would be on board.

A time bomb, ignited by a clockwork mechanism described in the most minute technical details, would blow up the ship and set her on fire (so what’s new on the terrorism front?). A priest had offered to carry out the assassination on behalf of the Strozzi against payment (which he instantly gambled away), but had then let Fra Leone down and ended in chains – a just punishment for those who promise an honest murder and are then amoral enough to break their word.

The poison, in liquid form, meant to kill De’ Medici had already been prepared and stored in two glass phials – by a person who appears prominently in the annals of the Knights of Malta. The chemist Biagio Pesci, known to all as Biagio della Campana from the pharmacy he ran, figures in a hallucinating series of murders that followed Fra Leone Strozzi’s failure to be elected Grand Master of the Order of Malta. Strozzi’s guaranteed succession to Grand Master Juan D’Homedes had been thwarted at the very last moment by the interventions of Fra Giorgio Vagnone, Fra Giovanni Antonio Pescatore and Fra Bernardo Parpaglia, and the electors, contrary to all expectations, chose Fra Claude de La Sengle instead.

The three knights who opposed Fra Leone died in mysterious and suspicious circumstances soon afterwards, and all the indications pointed to their having been poisoned by Biagio Pesci, “an intimate retainer of the Strozzi”. Pesci was, however, cheated of a lifetime’s occasion to boast of his triple whammy for long: Fra Aleramo Parpaglia, a brother of one of his victims, soon stabbed him to death. It had been one poisoning too many.

Fra Aleramo, himself not a troublemaker to dismiss lightly, had already been a fugitive from the Order’s justice for his killing of Gaspare de Sena, a mercenary from Syracuse. In turn, the hot-blooded knight died fighting the Turks during the Great Siege, bravely, religiously and with two trifling murders under his belt.

“Mattia Preti, with admirable even-handedness, depicted both Parpaglia and Fra Leone Strozzi among the saints and heroes of the Order at the base of the vault of St John’s church”. Standards for admittance to holiness and greatness must then not have been particularly taxing. Those were singularly violent times, with murder matter-of-factly brightening up every other day.

Incidentally, Pesci, not one to be derailed by moral rectitude, had switched his political allegiances: in 1539 this creative toxicologist had been suspected of being on the payroll of De’ Medici in his feud with Cardinal Innocenzo Cibo. The cardinal openly accused De’ Medici of paying Pesci to poison Giulio, the illegitimate son of Duke Alexander de’ Medici, perceived by De’ Medici as a threat and a rival. But then Pesci suffered a Damascene conversion; hit by the blistering light of grace, he moved from one murderous employer to another.

Before the actual questioning of Del Rosso started, the interrogators had prepared a written questionnaire, presumably to make sure they would not overlook any area they wanted the enquiry to cover. One of the queries to be put referred to Pesci specifically: Del Rosso had to disclose who had been the important personage poisoned by Pesci, who acknowledged that as a result of this successful homicide he had acquired the right to a living from, and the favour of, the Strozzi?

Del Rosso did not deny his association with Pesci in the preparation of the poison, but all the same tried hard to obfuscate the identity of its target: Piero Strozzi, he claimed, had fallen madly in love (ferventemente innamorato) with the wife of Pucci (Pandolfo? The one later hanged from a window of the Bargello for plotting to have De’ Medici shot by two hired sharpshooters with a harquebus from a window of the Pucci Palace? De’ Medici, traumatised by the discovery, ordered that window to be walled up permanently, and it remains so bricked to the present day).

Whoever this Pucci was whose wife had made Piero Strozzi weak in the knees, Strozzi wanted the inconvenient husband out of the way; he reckoned a few drops of Pesci’s special in Pucci’s wine (vin santo, if I know the Florentines enough) would be cheaper and less time-consuming than a papal petition for a marriage annulment. And the best lawyers anyone could hire had yet to come up with any really effective appeal against death, either. Del Rosso adds he had told Fra Leone of Piero Strozzi’s determination to poison the husband, to get him to work on his brother to “find his head again”.

Over the very long years of his detention in the Medici prisons, Del Rosso’s conditions and quality of life gradually improved. This external change went, not surprisingly, hand in hand with his internal downfall – his progressively more and more fawning professions of loyalty to and admiration of his torturer De’ Medici. His later literary productions he dedicated, gushingly and without a residual shred of dignity, to the Grande Cosimo, whom he had made it his lifetime’s design to eliminate.

One surviving letter to Duke Cosimo, the captive closes with these words: “I recommend myself again most humbly and most devoutly to Your Excellency, praying God for your happiness. Your most humble and devout vassal and servant, Paolo del Rosso”.

In terms of realpolitik, if Del Rosso wanted to survive he had very little choice but to wallow in dishonour, and he grabbed what little choice he had – the Medici had won, the Strozzi had lost, and his two powerful friends and protectors, Piero and Leone Strozzi, were dead by then, both killed violently in warfare. He couldn’t beat, so he joined.

It is to these latter times of imprisonment in the citadel of Pisa or in the Bargello that Del Rosso’s work on the Order of Malta belongs – maybe he felt he had some debt of gratitude to repay. Two Grand Masters had intervened on Del Rosso’s behalf with De’ Medici, though rather half-heartedly, it seems to me. Claude de La Sengle, on his election as Grand Master in 1553, sent De’ Medici the usual self-congratulatory circular that announced to all Christian rulers in Europe who the new head of the Order of St John was, couched in brazenly faux humility.

La Sengle could have had very meagre sympathy for Del Rosso, one of the most vocal supporters of Leone Strozzi, his rival and contestant for the post of Grand Master. Although, if truth be told, when the election was over and the absent La Sengle won, it was Fra Leone Strozzi who sailed his galley from Malta to give the news to the Grand Master-elect at Terracina, and to convey him to Malta. Good loser? The ultimate gentleman? Or an unmentionably sinister conspirator? Was Biagio Pesci also a passenger on that ship?

De’ Medici answered congratulating La Sengle on his election. In his reply thanking the Florentine ruler, the Grand Master took advantage of the occasion to request the release of Fra Paolo del Rosso (who he calls Russo), not unlikely at the prompting of Fra Leone himself.

“Since it has pleased divine goodness to place me in this position, it has become my duty to protect those entrusted to my care. There is, in the custody of Your Excellency, a knight of this Order called Fra Paolo Russo who, according to what I am told, is a man of letters and a very capable person; I would like to petition you to be pleased to do me the grace and favour to send him back to me, and if it were found that he has committed anything that caused prejudice or displeasure to Your Excellency, I undertake to punish him in a way that you will be most satisfied.”

De’ Medici seems to have ignored La Sengle’s plea – which is not surprising. What does appears to be very surprising is that the Grand Master did not raise the issue of who had jurisdiction to put Del Rosso on trial – was it Florence or Malta? The Order hung tenaciously to its old privileges, foremost among them the exclusive right it claimed to try its knights for criminal offences wherever these were alleged to have been committed.

There are many instances on record in which the Order kicked up a huge fuss when other sovereigns arrested and tried members of the Order of Malta for crimes committed on their territory. In Del Rosso’s case, not one whisper of protest. Maybe the Order thought it politic not to rub De’ Medici the wrong way, anyway not over a murderous felon intent on snuffing out the prince himself. Or, anyway, not over a knight prominently in the retinue of a powerful rival in the recent election for the Grand Mastership.

To be concluded.

Note: The portrait published last Sunday referred to another Cosimo de’ Medici (1389-1464), not to Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519-1574) who ordered the torture and imprisonment of Paolo del Rosso.