For our 50th episode, I give an overview of how the Medici went from being just one of several powerful banking families to joining the ranks of European royalty and high nobility.
Before I get started, I just wanted to say sincerely thank you for listening. I started this podcast around the time I was laid off from a job, I didn’t seem to have any real prospects, and I was living in an apartment I didn’t like but I could barely afford. Then during the time I kept on with the podcast I made the difficult decision to go back to school and try to start a new career, I finished my second Master’s degree in Library Science, and…well, things have gotten a lot better since, but I’m still working on the getting a day job I can be happy with or making something like this my job part. I never expected this podcast to become as successful as other history podcasts like the “History of Rome” podcast and…well, it’s not, but that said it’s certainly drawn more regular listeners than I ever expected. On top of the kind emails I often receive and the generous donations from my Patreon supporters, that fact alone helps me get through the bad times, like my recent car accident. It really does.
So thank you.
And with that…
When our narrative picked up with the Medici, they were just one of several prominent families in Florence. Some of the branches of the family were also far from wealthy. In fact, the ancestors of the branch of the family that would become the Medici we have been following were practically impoverished. Then, within the course of a little over 100 years, they went from being just one of several wealthy banking families to becoming the top bankers of Florence to the unofficial rulers of the city to movers and shakers at the Vatican finally to becoming the hereditary, de facto lords of Florence, rubbing elbows with the royal and noble clans of Europe.
How did that happen?
I talked before how, as a historian, I don’t like to think of history in terms of a binary between Great Person Theory and history just being a matter of abstract forces. It’s the complex interplay of personalities and social, political, cultural, and economic trends that make history, in my opinion. I don’t think it’s easy to honestly deny that Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo the Magnificent weren’t brilliant and made the Medici’s success possible. Sure, they probably weren’t like a Julius Caesar or Napoleon, the sort of historical figure whom I’ve heard historians describe as people who transcended their own times and places and remade their worlds to their liking. But I think the Medici’s own history shows that their victory was not inevitable. Indeed, if anything, it suggests their victory almost certainly wouldn’t have happened without Cosimo and Lorenzo’s skillful leadership and appreciation for their circumstances.
That said, the Medici did clearly benefit from certain circumstances particular to Florentine and Italian history. In the Middle Ages, Florence was home to the richest economy in Europe outside the Netherlands and Constantinople. Also it was arguably the only European economy that had a real manufacturing sector. This made Florence the home to a strong and politically assertive middle class that gave rise to Florence’s guild system. The complexity of Florence’s economy and the power of its middle class, I think, served as an effective bulwark from anyone seizing power in Florence as happened in so many other Italian cities and towns. The signores who came to power like the Visconti in Milan or the Gonzagas in Mantua usually came out of the nobility or at least the class of wealthy landowners. It’s not a coincidence that signores failed to take power in both Florence, Genoa, and Venice, all places where the economy was rooted in manufacturing, trade, or both, and where the middle class could get away with being assertive. On that note, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the rise of the Medici nearly coincides with the decline of the guild system or that the Medici and their main rivals were bankers. After all, in a city like Florence, more power would lie in the hands of the bankers than with the landowners. It was banking that gave the Medici the connections outside of Florence that made their rise to power possible.
Again, when we talk about this it’s hard not to make it sound like some kind of authoritarian coup against a thriving democracy, but that’s thinking in modern terms. The rise of the Medici wasn’t quite like if some group gradually undermined the government of modern-day France and replaced it with an absolute monarchy. The great conservative enemy of the Medici, Giovan Battista Alberti, didn’t want to replace the Medici regime with what we’d consider a truly republican regime, where the franchise is opened to a large number of the population, but an oligarchy where power is restricted to the wealthiest and most distinguished families of Florence. True, later anti-Medici voices like Savonarola would have a more democratic understanding of government, although they would also often support theocratic legislation that would restrict people’s personal freedoms more than under the Medici. As the Medici grew more powerful, people would complain about the excessive punishments dished out to even average people accused of treason who really just idly wished death and disaster upon the Medici. But overall, people did not find their freedoms were more restricted under the Medici than they were under the oligarchy or the Savonarolan republics. In fact, under the Savonarolans they did lose various freedoms. I think it’s important for us to lose our modern understandings of democracies versus authoritarian regimes and keep this in mind when we think about the rise of the Medici. To the majority of Florentines, it was very much either new boss, same as the old boss or preferable to rule under the uptight, busybody Savonarolans.
Of course, all this still leaves the question, why was it the Medici and not one of their powerful banking rivals like the Strozzi or the Alberti? Well, I certainly think the Medici’s patronage of great artists, scholars, and architects did play a role. Prestige was a valuable currency surpassed only by actual money. And the Medici did have a knack for picking talent: Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli… Having such greats at their disposal not only meant they could put their name to great works of art, books, and buildings, but they could also loan out their biggest names to foreign courts, deepening their political networks. Also to really get a sense of how important patronage was you have to understand how much the sense of family was intertwined with the state. By paying for and assigning the architects of new churches and other buildings, the patrons are advertising their dynasty. These buildings would carry their family crest, paintings and statues of the family patriarch, and images of the family’s chosen saints. And given the Medici’s fantastic wealth and their reach, the people of Florence would have constantly been reminded of the Medici name and have gotten accustomed to associating the republic itself with the Medici.
The Medici were well aware of the propaganda value in this. As Alison Brown notes in her essay “De-Masking Renaissance Republicanism”, the Medici mixed together the emblems of the republic and of the state and the Medici themselves. For example, the Medici Palace combined the city’s coat of arms with the balls representing the Medici dynasty, the palle. The point was clear: the Medici and Florence itself were inseparable.
But of course it wasn’t all propaganda. There were nuts and bolts to the Medici machine. As I discussed in earlier episodes, Florentine elections continued to be run by lot, with citizens randomly selected. However, the Medici ran the councils which determined which candidates were eligible for selection. This didn’t necessarily mean that selection for office became more limited. On the contrary, under the Medici more candidates from outside the upper class were appointed. However, this did mean that more men who were dependents of the Medici were placed in office. The Medici also relied more on the balia, councils that were originally called in national emergencies but which the Medici used to bypass the legislative bodies. Medici clients also infiltrated Florentine politics on the neighborhood level, giving them control over the running of the government from the ground up.
But I don’t believe one should see this as a grand plan by the Medici. Cosimo’s establishment of the invisible throne from which the Medici presided over Florentine politics was in many ways a reaction to his enemies’ efforts to imprison and even kill him. As John Najemy writes in his history of Florence, “A Major reason for Cosimo’s success over the next three decades was that he never forgot how close he came to losing everything.” Similarly, his son Piero ended up seizing more power in no small part because his enemies overstepped. Even taking into account the pro-Medici bias of quite a few of our historical sources, I think it’s accurate to say that the Medici’s rise to power was as much a matter of survival as it was of ambition. And the Medici certainly benefited from the fact that it boasted several members who were talented and seasoned leaders who came along at the right time. It’s not a coincidence that the regime survived and even thrived under the guidance of Cosimo, Piero the Gouty, and Lorenzo the Magnificent while it toppled when a young, unexperienced person like Piero the Unfortunate was at the helm.
At the same time, I wouldn’t deny that history did give the Medici a winning hand. If the economic currents of northern Italy had never shifted, the guild system in Florence would have never weakened, and in that case I don’t think the Medici or any of the other great families of Florence would have been able to come to power. This is admittedly speculation on my part, but I think you can see how the decline of the guilds opened the way for single families, whether they were the Medici or the Soderini, to monopolize power. With the middle class having even less of a voice in city politics and the working class practically losing what voice they had, it was perhaps inevitable Florentine politics would become even more of a contest between rival influential families. And, of course, without powerful personalities like Pope Julius II or Emperor Charles V, the Medici simply would not have made it to the finish line at all.
So, to sum it up, the story of how the Medici came to truly rule Florence isn’t one you can reduce to simply the triumph of great personalities or the whims of history. Instead, it’s a story of individual actors asserting themselves and having to navigate around change and circumstance.
Next time, I’ll pick back up with the story of Alessandro de’ Medici and how the Medici family once again rebounded from a catastrophe that should have ended their line.
The Medici Podcast 