From discovery.com: Italy's Medici Murder Plot Solved.
One of the most notorious crimes of the Renaissance, the attempted assassination of Florence's grandest son, Lorenzo dei Medici, has been solved more than 500 years later.
Known as the Pazzi conspiracy, the plot was led by Francesco dei Pazzi, whose banking family had resented for years the Medici climb to power.
The Pazzi plotted to kill Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano during a High Mass in the city's cathedral in April 1478. Wounded, Lorenzo managed to escape and barricade himself behind the bronze sacristy doors, but Giuliano bled to death on the cathedral floor.
New findings now reveal that the plot was more than the result of a feud between two families. Behind the Pazzis lay a larger network of powerful conspirators who aimed to destroy Lorenzo the Magnificent and his expansionist ambitions for the Florentine state.
"One of the prime movers in the plot was none less than Federico da Moltefeltro, Duke of Urbino, always portrayed as a good friend of Lorenzo," Marcello Simonetta, a historian at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, told Discovery News.
The proof lies in a secret letter to Urbino's ambassadors in Rome that lay forgotten in the private Ubaldini archive. The letter was encrypted, but Simonetta had one advantage when he tried to decipher it: a 15th-century booklet written by an ancestor of his, explaining how to decode diplomatic correspondence. [continue]
Related:
The Medici Family - Wikipedia
Exhuming the Medici family - Mirabilis.ca