Over the course of just a few days, the fallout spread. From the ousting of the Medicean faction, as family members, friends and affiliated clergy fled from Florence, and as the French arrived securing their ineterests. The second week of November saw many changes. Old families and also new, but trusted diplomats, and still other new men, advanced to fill roles. A curious roster of names and positions tumble before view. There was a coup and many fell and many more driven out. A few others made the old positions into their new ones, for awhile, and in different forms. Martines gives an interesting list of some of these characters and their stories in crisp fashion. The Signoria rang the bell for all patriots to defend the state and many came to the city center.
Piero de Medici himself escaped to Bologna with close family the night of the overthrow, with Giovanni the Cardinal (and future pope Leo X) sitting prominently up in the window, praying well into the night and then later escaping the city in Franciscan garb.
The Bargello or Podesta - the head constable, or one of his guards - had been cut down in the daytime crush in the Signoria Piazza. Francesco Valori one of the six men on the ambassadorial team in consultation with the French King had just returned. With a band of men they stormed the Palazzo of the Bargello and stocked themselves up on arms. Many other beneficiaries of the decades of Medicean leadership risked their lives in trying to save things. A bounty was put on the persons of Piero and Giovanni. The Eight, a body of powerful appointed men who had overseen political and criminal policing, were suspended by the Signoria.
The Signoria also at some point sent guards with arms to defend the Medici Palace as the crowds grew and lingered. But officials began confiscating treasures for themselves. Rings were taken from the fingers of weeping women. The Cardinal's house was sacked however. As well as that of Ser Giovanni da Pratovecchio and Antonio di Bernardo Miniati. A prominent jurist Francesco Gualterotti saved the house of Messer Agnolo Niccolini when the mob set his door afire.
Martines cooly points out that the new men that took the emerging roles also had to recognize that some of the houses of past leading men should also be protected, lest the mob overtake the entire city's amassed wealth. Three of Piero's closest adherents were chosen, and brought into protection in the Signoria. Another, the former ambassador (and just back from visiting King Charles of France), fled north to Lombardy.
Edicts from the Signoria were released allowing family members from certain exiled houses to return at long last to Florence. Some gone as long as sixty years and more were allowed the right to return. Within days, people with old names like Acciaiuoli, Barbadori, Guasconi, Lamberteschi, Pazzi, Petruzzi and Strozzi began returning.
The Signoria also disbanded the Seventy, an advising voting chamber full of Medicean sympathisers. They also dropped admission for members of the dreaded Otto di Pratica which conducted foreign affairs. They were re-assigning values to the entire structure of the former Medicean system, dropping chambers and counseling bodies and appointing loyalists, whatever they called themselves.
As the days ticked on, as edicts came out, and as Martines mentions, as the murals from the Palazzo de Podesta of exiled families and previous Medicean victories were taken down and carted through the streets, word from the swelling French ranks came too, louder and louder. King Charles of France thought it best that Piero be able to return to Florence. This set off conversations in a different direction and some people had to reassign values among allies and friends, again. Word that the French had taken Pisa, a long held subordinate with plenty of essential resources and means for wealth acquisition, also began to spread. This idea that the French took Pisa rather than Piero giving it away seems lost in the larger story for many, that Piero was simply incompetent. The conversation of whether France had come as liberators, or conquerors welled up again, as all began to seem lost.
The moment was right for friar Girolamo Savonarola to step into the middle of all this. He already had.
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pp. 38-41 in Martines, Lauro: Fire In The City: Savonarola and the struggle for the soul of Renaissance Florence ; Oxford University Press, New York, 2006
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