Free The Sistine Secrets by Benjamin Blech, Roy Doliner Page A

absolute end in September 476, when a young emperor was forced by a barbarian king to abdicate the throne. Through an ironic twist of fate, this very last emperor was called Romulus, after the founder of Rome. Thus the history of Rome came full circle after thirteen centuries.
    Thankfully, in the Orient, Constantinople survived and kept the flame of Western civilization going, in spite of much infighting and political intrigue. The Eastern empire took the name Byzantium. In a reflection of its torturous history, when we today want to refer to deep corruption mixed with double-and triple-crossing political schemes, we use the adjective byzantine. (Not surprisingly, this word is also often used to describe the Vatican court during the time of Michelangelo.)
    Strangely enough, it was the Church itself that dealt one of the worst blows to Christian Constantinople. The Western knights of the Fourth Crusade, under the direction of the autocratic Pope Innocent III, sacked the city and ripped it to shreds in the early thirteenth century, as part of the pope’s plan for absolute world domination by the Vatican. Weakened by Rome, rotted on the inside by corruption, Byzantine Constantinople limped onward until the Turkish Muslim conquest of 1453. Again, history was playing tricks with the protagonists’ names. The Muslim conqueror of Byzantium was Mohammed II, and its last Christian emperor was another Constantine.
    The Turks’ sacking of the doomed city lasted many days. The raping and butchering of the Christians so horrified the West that it is still a burning memory for many, even serving as a battle call in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in parts of Eastern Europe. Every intellectual, scientist, and artist who could flee to the West did so, bringing with them many precious relics and artifacts and, most important, priceless texts and key ancient documents that represented the very best of Classical thought.
    Two of these texts, thanks to many risks and even more bribes, made it out of the new Ottoman Islamic Empire and had a huge effect on the Renaissance and its art, including what we see today in the Sistine Chapel. One of these salvaged texts was the Corpus Hermeticus, the writings of the Egyptian mystic Hermes Trismegistus. The other was a collection of writings of the great Greek philosopher Plato. The man who paid a fortune for these texts and had them smuggled into Italy was one of the richest men in Europe, Cosimo de’ Medici. His rise and the achievements of his family are the next thread in this historic tapestry of Florence in the time of Michelangelo.
    ENTER THE DE’ MEDICIS
     
    On the one hand, it would seem that the de’ Medici family had much in common with Michelangelo’s family, the Buonarrotis. They were both very old Florentine clans, and although they had no real roots in nobility, both families liked to believe they did and actively pined for social acceptance on that exalted level. On the other hand, that is where the similarities end. Whereas the Buonarrotis were for the most part inept at business and finance, the de’ Medicis quickly rose from wool dealers to moneylenders to the top bankers of their day—indeed, according to many, they were the richest family in all Europe. The founder of the family fortune was Cosimo the Elder. He also set the family on its path of unofficially ruling the city of Florence and of collecting and commissioning great works of art. Michelangelo’s family never learned how to navigate in high society, and—except for the artist himself—regarded the arts as a frivolous waste of time and money. It was Cosimo the Elder who discovered the great artists Donatello and Botticelli, sponsored the brilliant but eccentric architect Brunelleschi and his amazing dome for the cathedral (still an engineering wonder after six centuries), and also paid for the two aforementioned ancient texts to reach Florence.
    Cosimo took the young scholar Marsilio Ficino under his wing,