In a time of simmering class tensions and growing exploitation of the poor, Salvestro de’ Medici turns against his conservative comrades and declares he’s on the side of the downtrodden. On his political agenda? Backing an all-out war against the Pope.
Transcript
As you probably expect from living in the 21st century, all those wages spiking up and workers getting the power to seek employment with different employers didn’t sit well with the rich. So, in the years following the original outbreak of the Black Death, there was a conservative retrenchment.
In the spring of 1348, the Black Death reaches Florence, devastating its population but also clearing new avenues for the non-rich. In the aftermath, a moderately affluent landowner, Salvestro de’ Medici, embarks on a political career. Just how far can Salvestro make it, between siding with the conservative establishment against his own family’s populist sympathies and the antics of his violently unstable brothers?
Titled The Holy Trinity (c. 1427), this is a fresco by Masaccio that lies in the Santa Maria Novella in Florence. The realistic depiction of human remains is characteristic of the art trends that emerged during the half century following the Black Death. The routes taken by the Black Death around the West. From D. Cesana, O.J. Benedictow, and R. Bianucci, The Origin and Early Spread of the Black Death in Italy from here.
Transcript
Let’s start the story of one of the most catastrophic and decisive events in the history of Florence and the Medici family about 4,000 miles away from Florence, at a small cottage on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul [Izek-Kul] in modern-day Kyrgyzstan [Kergizstan]. There lived a woman named Magnu-Kelka and her husband Kutluk. We know very little about them except for two things, thanks to their grave inscriptions. They were Nestorian Christians, a sect of Christianity that developed in Syria and spread as far eastward as China. The other thing we know is that they died in 1339, very early victims of what we know as the Black Death.
The Medici Podcast 