House of Medici

• 1. Introduction

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  The House of Medici began not in a palace, but in a wool trader's ledger. A family from the agricultural Mugello region north of Florence, first mentioned in a document of 1230, the Medici spent generations in modest trade before a bank they founded in 1397 became the largest financial institution in Europe. From that foundation, they would produce four popes, two queens of France, and a dynasty of dukes and grand dukes who ruled Tuscany for more than two centuries. They financed the construction of Saint Peter's Basilica and Florence Cathedral. They funded the invention of the piano, and arguably that of opera. They were patrons to Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Galileo, and Machiavelli. How did a family of wool merchants climb to the summit of European power? And what caused that same dynasty to collapse, ending with a grand duke who vomited repeatedly into his napkin and spent his final years confined to a bed that smelled of faeces? This documentary traces the full arc of the Medici: the banking genius that lifted them up, the political cunning that kept them in power, the art they left behind, and the slow rot that brought them down.

• 2. The Bank That Built a Dynasty

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  Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, born around 1360, turned a modest family inheritance into something unprecedented. The Medici Bank he established in 1397 grew to become, by the 15th century, the largest bank in Europe. Giovanni never held political office, yet he gained popular standing in Florence by backing a proportional system of taxation. His son Cosimo would later translate that popularity into something far more durable.

  The bank's reach was extraordinary. The Medici were among the earliest businesses to use double-entry bookkeeping for tracking credits and debits, a system that gave them a clearer picture of their finances than almost any rival institution. The family's wealth initially came from the textile trade guided by Florence's wool guild, the Arte della Lana, with strong commercial ties to France and Spain.

  A stroke of geological fortune accelerated their rise. In 1433, vast deposits of alum were discovered in Tolfa. Alum was essential as a mordant in the dyeing of cloth, and Florence's main industry was textile manufacturing. Before this discovery, the Turks held a near-monopoly on alum exports to Europe. Pope Pius II granted the Medici a monopoly on mining in Tolfa, making them the primary producers of alum across the continent. The financial implications were staggering.

  The bank's lifespan ran from 1397 to 1494, when it fell. During those years it stood as one of the most respected financial institutions in Europe. Lorenzo de' Medici, brilliant as a patron and politician, neglected the banking business, and that neglect hastened its ruin.

• 3. Power Without a Crown

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  Cosimo de' Medici, called Pater Patriae, or father of the country, took over as informal head of the Florentine Republic in 1434. He did so after a temporary reversal: the rival Albizzi family had managed to have him exiled in 1433. Within a year, a pro-Medici civic government, led by Tommaso Soderini, Oddo Altoviti, and Lucca Pitti, was elected, and Cosimo returned. Florence remained technically a republic until 1537, but from that point forward the Medici ran it.

  Three successive generations held this informal grip. Cosimo, then his son Piero, then his grandson Lorenzo, each dominated Florentine government without abolishing its republican form. Piero, called "the Gouty" because gout pained his foot and eventually killed him, held power for only five years, from 1464 to 1469. Unlike his father, he had little interest in the arts.

  The family's social position was carefully engineered through marriage, business partnerships, and employment ties. Several elite Florentine families, including the Bardi, Altoviti, Ridolfi, Cavalcanti, and Tornabuoni, had access to the broader elite network only through the Medici. At least half of Florence's people were employed by the Medici and their associated business branches at the height of their influence.

  The official break from citizenship to monarchy came in 1532, when the family acquired the hereditary title Duke of Florence. In 1569, the duchy rose again, elevated to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany after territorial expansion.

• 4. The Pazzi Conspiracy

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  On Easter Sunday 1478, two men stood in a church during services, preparing to commit murder. The Pazzi conspiracy was an attempt to kill both Lorenzo de' Medici and his younger brother Giuliano simultaneously. The plot involved the rival Pazzi and Salviati banking families, the Archbishop of Pisa, the priest conducting the services, and even Pope Sixtus IV to a degree. The conspirators approached Sixtus IV seeking his approval, given his own long rivalry with the Medici. He gave no official sanction, but allowed the plot to proceed without interference.

  Giuliano was killed. Lorenzo survived, wounded. After the failed assassination, Pope Sixtus IV nonetheless gave dispensation for crimes committed in the service of the church. Lorenzo then adopted his brother's illegitimate son, a boy named Giulio de' Medici, born in 1478. That child would eventually become Pope Clement VII.

  Lorenzo's response to the conspiracy was characteristically strategic. He groomed his surviving children carefully. His headstrong son Piero II was shaped to follow him in civil leadership. His son Giovanni was placed in the church at an early age and would become Pope Leo X. His daughter Maddalena was given a substantial dowry to arrange a politically advantageous marriage to a son of Pope Innocent VIII, strengthening the alliance between the Medici and the Cybo and Altoviti families in Rome.

  When Lorenzo died in 1492, his son Piero II proved unable to manage the French invasion of Italy. Within two years, Piero and his supporters were expelled from Florence and replaced by a republican government.

• 5. Popes and Patrons

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  The Medici produced four popes. Pope Leo X held the papacy from 1513 to 1521. Pope Clement VII served from 1523 to 1534. Pope Pius IV from 1559 to 1565. Pope Leo XI reigned briefly in 1605. The two most consequential were Leo X and Clement VII, who became, for a time, the de facto political rulers of Rome, Florence, and large swaths of the Papal States.

  Both men were generous patrons. Leo X commissioned extensively from Raphael. Clement VII commissioned Michelangelo to paint the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, a project completed just before Clement's death in 1534. Yet both papacies were defined as much by catastrophe as by art. Leo X's pontificate bankrupted Vatican coffers. Clement VII's was dominated by a cascade of crises, culminating in the sack of Rome in 1527 by the armies of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

  Clement VII navigated the aftermath with skill of a particular kind. He allied himself with Charles V and secured the engagement of Charles V's daughter Margaret of Austria to Alessandro de' Medici. He then convinced Charles to name Alessandro as Duke of Florence, beginning the two-century Medici monarchical reign over that city. Clement also arranged the marriage of his first cousin, twice removed, Catherine de' Medici, to the future King Henry II of France. Through Catherine's daughters, Medici blood passed to the royal family of Spain through Elisabeth of Valois, and to the House of Lorraine through Claude of Valois.

  In 1534, Clement VII died following a lengthy illness. His death, alongside the subsequent mysterious death of Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici in 1535, left the family's senior branch dangerously exposed.

• 6. The Grand Duchy and Its Decline

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  Cosimo I rose from relatively modest beginnings in the Mugello to dominate all of Tuscany. He defeated Florence's rival Siena in battle, founded the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, purchased a portion of the island of Elba from the Republic of Genoa to base the Tuscan navy, and died in 1574. His son Francesco married Johanna of Austria, and their daughter Marie de' Medici became Queen of France and Navarre. Through Marie, all subsequent French monarchs except the Napoleons were descended from Francesco.

  Ferdinando I, who succeeded in 1587, was an energetic administrator. He drained the Tuscan marshlands, built a road network in southern Tuscany, cultivated trade in Livorno, and planted mulberry trees along major roads to feed the silk industry. He also sponsored an expedition to the New World with the intention of establishing a Tuscan colony, though no permanent colonial acquisitions resulted. In 1605, he succeeded in getting his candidate elected as Pope Leo XI, though Leo died the same month.

  Cosimo II, Ferdinando's successor, reigned for under twelve years and is remembered chiefly as the patron of Galileo Galilei, whose 1610 treatise Sidereus Nuncius was dedicated to him. Cosimo II died of tuberculosis in 1621. The regency that followed, managed by his widow Maria Maddalena and his grandmother Christina of Lorraine and known as the Turtici, was later blamed by historian Harold Acton for setting Tuscany on the path of decline. The regents doubled the Tuscan clergy, aligned with the papacy, and allowed the heresy trial of Galileo to proceed.

  By the time of Cosimo III, who reigned from 1670 to 1723, the grand duchy was bankrupt. The population of Florence had declined by 50% compared to the previous century. The grand duchy as a whole had lost an estimated 40% of its population. Cosimo III died in October 1723, his final proclamation commanding that Tuscany remain independent entirely ignored by the European powers who had already decided its fate.

• 7. The Last Medici

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  Gian Gastone, the final Medici Grand Duke, made little pretense of dignity. He despised his sister Anna Maria Luisa for engineering his catastrophic marriage to Anna Maria Franziska of Saxe-Lauenburg. Following a sprained ankle in 1731, he never left his bed again. His entourage, called the Ruspanti, was a decrepit circle he seemed to cherish precisely because his sister abhorred them. His conduct at the banquets organized to draw him into society was, by the account preserved in the source, less than regal.

  His sister Anna Maria Luisa, the Electress Palatine, was a sharply different figure. Her husband Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine, had successfully requisitioned the dignity of Royal Highness for the Grand Duke and the Medici family in 1691. Anna Maria Luisa outlived the dynasty's political power and used her remaining years to preserve its cultural one.

  She died on the 19th of February 1743, and with her died the grand ducal line. The Florentines grieved her. She was interred in the crypt of San Lorenzo that she had helped complete. The Patto di Famiglia she signed is the reason the Uffizi, the Boboli Gardens, the Medici Chapel, and the rest of the family's extraordinary art collections remain in Florence today.