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Francesco de' Pazzi — Description

Francesco de’ Pazzi was born on January 28, 1444, one of the three sons of Antonio de’ Pazzi, a leading figurehead in Florence's most prosperous banking family. Well… second most prosperous banking family. They'd be number 1 if it weren't for those meddling Medici and their dog, but heyyyy we're all friends here. No need to get bitter about it. Francesco made the most of the cards he was dealt growing up, becoming the head of the Pazzi Bank in Rome by December 1473. He just needed to sacrifice enough wage slaves to that ever-fickle eldritch god that rich assholes worship called the Invisible Hand and eventually he'd get his chance to be the richest asshole in all of Italy! And lo, the blood god answered his prayers! Because Pope Sixtus IV was in the market for some fuckin clout, and the Medici were about to fumble the transaction.
See, Sixtus was in the habit of giving all his greedy little nephews basically whatever they wanted because who's gonna say no to the Pope? God? Pfffft we all know he can't be bothered to come down and set the record straight. For Girolamo Riario, the nephew who… may have actually been Sixtus's son but shhhhh keep that between him and Jesus, Sixtus wanted to buy the city of Imola from Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the Duke of Milan. The only problem was that Sforza had already promised to sell Imola to his best bud Lorenzo de Medici, so Sixtus had to sweeten the pot, offering up a marriage between Riario and Sforza's daughter Caterina. Ah shucks, sorry Lorenzo, can't pass that up! Imola thus got gobbled into the Papal States, and that didn't exactly put Lorenzo in the best mood, but then Sixtus had the audacity to still ask the Medici Bank to finance the transaction. I don't know how Sixtus expected to get any answer less than a massive middle finger, but when the Medici obviously refused, Sixtus got all pouty. Almost immediately, he cut the Medici Bank off from their previously cushy position as the Pope’s official bank.
This was awesome for Francesco, because naturally Sixtus went straight to the Medicis’ biggest competitors to replace the vacant seat in the Vatican's coffers. Personally, I'd have just quit while I was ahead, but Francesco wasn't the sort of guy to do that. In fact, he was instead the kind of guy who knew a guy if you, say, wanted someone publically murdered, someone like those Medici who'd pissed off the most powerful man in Christendom. Oh but Sixtus would totally know nothing about that, no no no! He'd just cracked open that dusty old Bible which was apparently required reading this whole time and I guess my man JC was very against murder, so Sixtus couldn't possibly condone Riario's suggestion that he sponsor an assassination. But uhh… you know, if someone just so happened to remove his most bitter enemies from the board for him of their own accord we-he-heeeeeell that's just part of God's plan!
So totally without his uncle's consent, Riario went to the only Florentine they knew in Rome, Francesco, and asked him to brainstorm the perfect plot to stab Lorenzo and his shit ass brother Giuliano in broad daylight. Francesco had the gist of a plan, but he'd been in Rome so long that he had virtually no connection to the socio-political atmosphere back in Florence. His uncle Jacopo, on the other hand, was a respected knight and aristocrat who'd be perfect for rallying the people into a mass uprising once the head honcho Medicis were out of the picture. Jacopo also had a lot of skeletons in his closet that would not bode well for his reputation if this plan went wrong but ahhhhh come on old man! Evidently, that was all the persuading Jacopo needed, though he was still apprehensive about cutting the Medici brothers down simultaneously in the middle of a giant crowd. Hot-headed Francesco was adamant, however. For the sake of the spectacle, Lorenzo and Giuliano had to die in the same place at the same time.
The opportunity came on April 26, 1478, exactly 521 years before I first graced the world with my screaming presence. High Mass was in session under Florence's famous il Duomo, when suddenly the priest's incessant ramblings were interrupted by a cry of “Here, traitor!”, which served as the brief yet effective prologue to one of the Pazzis’ patsies, Bernardo Baroncelli, catching Giuliano off guard with a knife to the chest. Giuliano stumbled backwards directly into Francesco de’ Pazzi, who dropped that poor bastard to the ground and started furiously pin-cushioning him with eighteen stab wounds. He was so passionate about turning this fucker into swiss cheese that dumbass accidentally stabbed himself in the leg in the process. Thankfully, absolute fucking pandemonium had obviously broken out, and he was still able to limp away in the crowd before the guards pounced on him. The blood trail he left behind is probably how the authorities found him not long after, but he also just like… went home, like literally to his own fucking house just a few blocks away to nurse his wounds. Bro, when you've killed the brother of the most powerful man in the city, gtfo. Your house is literally the first place they're going to raid.
If he hadn't stabbed himself in the leg, Francesco would've gone to ride with his uncle to try and rally popular support for the overthrow of the Medici, but he would've been equally disappointed in that timeline too, because, you know, people actually liked the Medici and they don't like a bunch of rich assholes stabbing someone in the middle of church. I know, fuckin snowflakes. Jacopo had the wits to skip town (or at least try to, they quickly pounced on his ass and strung him up), but Francesco was dragged naked out of his home and tortured for information. Francesco, for what it's worth, refused to give them a single word, and was thus hung by the neck from the roof of the Palazzo Vecchio. Next to him was hung fellow conspirator Francesco Salviati, who… and I'm still not entirely clear on what the fuck this visual is… apparently bit Francesco as they went down, locking his teeth into the dude's flesh until someone finally came and cut their corpses down. Wtf man? What am I reading?
Anyway, moral of the story is that Lorenzo survived the attack and rendered Francesco de’ Pazzi so irrelevant to history that most of us only know of his existence as a villain in Assassin's Creed II. Francesco didn't even leave a bloodline behind, having never married or having any kids. Yes, he's depicted as having a family in featured media but the we have a pretty extensive record of all the Pazzi relatives whose property rights the Medici fucking annihilated in the wake of the attack, and nowhere is Francesco listed as being married or having any sons that could be disinhereted. So, there was never actually a Vieri or a sister to be quite satisfied with the handling Ezio gave her earlier. That's probably for the best, honestly. The world doesn't need a Vieri in it. It barely needed a Francesco.
Design notes, not a lot of historical reference material to draw from of Francesco specifically. Pretty much all of the depictions of him are moreso renditions of the assassination itself which by extension include Francesco as one of the stabbers. Wikipedia uses an annoyingly low-res version of a painting by Tancredi Scarpelli for its page on Francesco, but I also dug up an engraving by Charles Victor Pardinel and a couple others which… Getty Images obnoxiously fails to cite. I know these are public domain images and I don't technically need to cite them but I think it's good etiquette, come on guys. Either way, none of them were especially detailed in the outfit department, and pretty much all of them depict Francesco with black hair even though he was blonde, so I ended up improvising a lot of the minor details. Is my version a bit too simplified? Probably, but at least it looks cohesive and I'm happy with its simplicity. I'm not exactly setting out with the intention of crafting a whole open world game set in Renaissance Florence with Francesco as a major antagonist, so fuck it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯