Republic of Florence

• 1. Introduction

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  The Republic of Florence was born from a single death. In 1115, when Matilda of Tuscany died and left her vast territories without an obvious heir, the people of Florence seized the moment. Rather than submit to her successor, Rabodo, they formed their own commune. That act of defiance launched a state that would endure, in various forms, for more than four centuries.

  What followed was one of the most turbulent and dazzling experiments in self-governance the medieval world had ever seen. Coups and countercoups rattled the republic every generation. Banking families rose to dominate European finance, then collapsed. Artists of incomparable ambition worked under the patronage of men who wanted both power and beauty. And at the center of it all, threading through nearly every chapter of the city's story, was a single family: the Medici.

  How did a city-state on the Arno become the birthplace of the Renaissance? What held the republic together when plague, faction, and foreign armies tried to tear it apart? And how did the whole experiment finally end, not with a revolution, but with a pope signing a piece of paper?

• 2. A Coin That Remade Europe

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  In 1252, the Florentine guilds did something that would reshape commerce across an entire continent. They minted a new gold coin: the florin. Its power came from something almost boring in its simplicity: a fixed, reliable gold content that merchants could trust from Bruges to Baghdad.

  Before the florin, large-scale trade across Europe relied on silver bars measured in multiples of the mark. The florin swept that system aside. It became the dominant trade coin of Western Europe for major transactions, and was imitated widely across the continent. The florin was, as historians note, the first European gold coin struck in sufficient quantities to play a significant commercial role since the seventh century.

  The coin was a product of the Guelphs, the populist faction that had just wrestled Florence away from the Ghibellines, who had ruled under Frederick of Antioch since 1244. The Guelphs' mercantile instincts drove the economy forward. The same year the florin was struck, Florence also saw the creation of the Palazzo del Popolo.

  By the late 13th century, Florentine banks were not local institutions. They were international companies with branches spread across Europe. When the Bonsignori family of Siena, one of the leading banking houses on the continent, went bankrupt in 1298, Florence did not mourn its rival. It absorbed the title of the foremost banking city of Europe.

• 3. Faction, Fire, and Plague

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  Peace in medieval Florence was always provisional. The war between the Guelphs and Ghibellines did not end with one faction's victory; authority passed back and forth between them for generations. In 1304, the conflict boiled over into catastrophe. A priest named Neri Abati, prior of San Piero Scheraggio, set fire to the dwellings of his own kinsmen in Orto-san-Michele. The flames spread through the richest and most crowded part of the city. More than nineteen hundred houses were consumed, and whole families were, as one contemporary account put it, "reduced in one moment to beggary."

  The Florentine banking families survived that fire, but not the next generation's crises. The Bardis, Peruzzis, and Acciaioli, who had risen after the Bonsignori collapse, all went bankrupt in 1340. The cause was not, despite widespread belief, King Edward III of England's refusal to pay his debts; that sum was just 13,000 pounds. The real culprit was a Europe-wide economic recession.

  The Black Death arrived in Messina in 1347 and swept north. Europe lost an estimated one-third of its population. Florence, already weakened economically, was hit hard. The plague's aftermath did more than kill people. It destabilized the feudal order across the continent, beginning, as the source puts it, "one of the first steps out of the Middle Ages."

  In 1378, discontented wool workers staged the Ciompi revolt, establishing a revolutionary commune. By 1382, the wealthier classes had crushed it. Florentine writers, however, kept working through all of it. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio all made their homes in Florence during this period. Their choice to write in the Tuscan dialect rather than Latin had a consequence no single author could have planned: Tuscan evolved into the standard Italian language.

• 4. The Rise of Cosimo

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  Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici founded his bank in October 1397. His son, Cosimo de' Medici, inherited the institution and used it as a platform for something more ambitious: the quiet domination of a republic.

  Cosimo was exiled in 1433 after a disastrous war with the neighboring Republic of Lucca. His exile in Venice lasted less than a year. The people of Florence reversed the decision in a democratic vote, welcomed Cosimo back, and banished the Albizzi family who had expelled him. From 1434 onward, Cosimo controlled Florence without holding official power.

  He spent that power lavishly on the mind. Niccolò Niccoli, the leading humanist scholar of the city, had appointed the first Professor of Greek at the University of Florence in 1397: Manuel Chrysoloras, whom the source identifies as the founder of Hellenic studies in Italy. When Niccoli died in 1437, he bequeathed his collection of ancient manuscripts to Cosimo. Poggio Bracciolini, born in Arezzo in 1380, succeeded Niccoli as Florence's principal humanist. Bracciolini traveled Europe hunting Greco-Roman manuscripts, and Cosimo made him Chancellor of Florence shortly before Bracciolini's death. Cosimo employed Donatello, Brunelleschi, and Michelozzo on artistic commissions that cost him over 600,000 florins in total.

  In 1439, Florence hosted the Great Ecumenical Council, convened by Pope Eugenius IV in response to a plea from the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaiologos, whose empire was being steadily consumed by the Ottoman Turks. Both sides reached a compromise, and the pope agreed to send military aid. But when John VIII returned to Constantinople, the Greeks rejected the agreement, riots broke out, and the emperor repudiated the deal. Western aid never came. Fourteen years later, in 1453, Constantinople fell.

  By 1458, Pope Pius II, stopping in Florence on the way to declare a crusade at the Council of Mantua, wrote in his memoirs that Cosimo was "considered the arbiter of war and peace, the regulator of law; less a citizen than master of his city. Political councils were held in his home; the magistrates he chose were elected; he was king in all but name and legal status."

• 5. Lorenzo and the Pazzi

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  Lorenzo de' Medici inherited his father Piero's role as Florence's de facto ruler in 1469. Piero, known as "the Gouty" for the illness that undermined his health, had died that winter after suppressing a coup backed by the Duke of Ferrara.

  Lorenzo became the greatest artistic patron of the Renaissance. He supported Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Botticelli, and combined that patronage with a personal passion for collecting fine gems. He had many children with his wife Clarice Orsini, among them the future Pope Leo X.

  In April 1478, Lorenzo's brother Giuliano was murdered before Lorenzo's eyes in what became known as the Pazzi conspiracy. The plot was organized by the Pazzi family and included the Archbishop of Pisa, Francesco Salviati. The coup failed, and the conspirators were executed with notable violence. Salviati was hanged in his ceremonial robes. Pope Sixtus IV, who had also supported the plot, responded by excommunicating everyone in Florence and dispatching a papal delegation to arrest Lorenzo. The population of Florence, including the local clergy, refused to hand him over. A two-year war followed, which Lorenzo ended through diplomacy.

  Lorenzo died in 1492. His son Piero ruled for only two years before Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in September 1494, demanding passage through Florence on his way to seize the throne of Naples. Piero met Charles at the fringes of the city and agreed to all his demands. When he returned in November, the Florentines branded him a traitor. He fled with his family, and the Medici's first era of rule was over.

• 6. Savonarola's City of God

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  Girolamo Savonarola arrived in Florence from Ferrara in the 1480s. He was a priest, not a politician. He built his authority through preaching and prophecy, winning the city to his cause through vigorous oratory.

  His government introduced democratic reforms and allowed exiles who had been banished under the Medici to return. But his underlying ambition was to transform Florence into a "city of God." Florentines stopped wearing garish colors. Many women took vows to become nuns. His most notorious act was the Bonfire of the Vanities, in which wigs, perfume, paintings, and ancient pagan manuscripts were gathered and burned.

  His rule lasted roughly a year after its peak before fracturing. Pope Alexander VI excommunicated him in late 1497. That same year, Florence went to war with Pisa, which had been effectively independent since Charles VIII's invasion three years earlier. The campaign failed badly, leading to food shortages. Isolated cases of plague followed. The people blamed Savonarola for their suffering.

  In May 1498, Florentine authorities had Savonarola tortured and burned at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria. The man who had ordered others' vanities destroyed was executed in the very public square that bore the name of the council he had briefly ruled.

  In 1502, Florence elected Piero Soderini as its first ruler for life. His Secretary of War, Niccolò Machiavelli, recaptured Pisa in 1509 and introduced a standing army, replacing Florence's traditional reliance on hired mercenaries.

• 7. The End of the Republic

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  Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici retook Florence in September 1512 with papal troops during the War of the League of Cambrai. Within months he was elected Pope, taking the name Leo X, and ruled Florence by proxy, first through his brother Giuliano and then, from 1516, through his nephew Lorenzo II de' Medici.

  Lorenzo II's government became deeply unpopular. The future U.S. President and historian John Adams later wrote that Lorenzo had begun "desiring to reduce the government to the form of a principality" and stopped consulting the magistrates or granting audiences. In 1519, Lorenzo II died from syphilis, shortly before his wife gave birth to Catherine de' Medici, the future Queen of France.

  In May 1527, Rome was sacked by the Holy Roman Empire. Pope Clement VII, himself a Medici, was imprisoned. Republicans drove the Medici from Florence once more. Clement VII responded by signing the Treaty of Barcelona with Emperor Charles V in 1529, offering the pope's blessing in exchange for an imperial invasion. The Medici were restored after an 11-month siege.

  On the 12th of August 1530, Charles V declared himself sole arbiter of Florence's government and made the Medici hereditary rulers. In April 1532, Pope Clement VII convinced Florence's ruling commission, the Balía, to ratify a new constitution. It abolished the signoria and the office of gonfaloniere, replacing them with a four-man council, a senate of forty-eight members, and a Council of Two Hundred.

  Alessandro de' Medici ruled as duke until the 1st of January 1537, when he was murdered by his distant relative Lorenzino de' Medici. Cosimo I succeeded him, defeated the exiled Strozzi family at Montemurlo, and rebuilt the administration from the ground up. In 1554, Cosimo's forces defeated the Republic of Siena at the Battle of Marciano, and in July 1557 Philip II of Spain formally granted Siena to Cosimo as a hereditary fiefdom. In 1569, Pope Pius V elevated Cosimo to the rank of Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the republic that had begun with a rebellion in 1115 quietly ceased to exist. The Medici ruled the Grand Duchy until the family became extinct in 1737.