‘He has emblazoned even the monks’ privies with his balls’ ‘A Florentine who is not a merchant…enjoys no esteem whatever’ Very useful to have genealogical tables and a map showing the complex divisions of the Italian peninsula at the height of Medici power.
Overall this was a mostly fascinating and colourful read, though I thought the referencing could have been better - there were detailed footnotes on art and architecture, but no specific sources for other stuff, including some of the more lurid anecdotes of sybaritic excess and violence. The later Grand Dukes were much less interesting and the line more or less fizzled out in gluttony and indolence in the 1730s (though their life spans were much longer than those of the earlier Medici rulers, who rarely lived beyond their 40s, even when they didn't die violently). I would have liked to read more about Grand Duke Cosimo's terrible siege of Siena (my favourite Italian city), in which so many inhabitants starved, and the dramatic and murderous events surrounding his immediate heirs Francesco and Ferdinando, but these were covered quite briefly (they also formed the backdrop to an excellent novel I read recently, The Shepherdess of Siena).
After this period, the remaining two centuries are dealt with in just 50 pages. There are some fascinating characters in the form of Cosimo the Elder, Lorenzo the Magnificent, the fanatical priest Savonarola who held power for a few years after a French invasion, and the two Medici popes, Giovanni (Leo X) and Giulio (Clement VII, the Pope who declined to agree Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon). The course of this book is very unbalanced in terms of chronological coverage, with the first of the three centuries of Medici dominance covering five sixths of the narrative but this is mostly justified in terms of the wider importance and sheer drama of the events involved. Rising from the merchant class they came to dominate the republic's government and become effectively a hereditary monarchy, though for a long time Florence continued to preserve a republican constitution, in which people from the merchant class were chosen by lot to form the city government, the Signoria. This is a fairly detailed political and personal history of the famous and colourful Medici family, who dominated the history of Florence and central Italy, and indeed more widely, for most of a 300 year period between the early 15th and early 18th centuries.
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