Florence’s wool bankers funded Michelangelo and popes
The Medici rose from Mugello farmers to Florence’s masters under Cosimo and Lorenzo the Magnificent, turning a 1397 bank into Europe’s envy until 1494. They became Dukes of Florence in 1532 and Grand Dukes of Tuscany in 1569, ruling until Gian Gastone died in 1737.
The Medici came from the farming country of the Mugello, north of Florence, and first turn up in a document of 1230. Their name is the plural of medico, a doctor, though why they bore it is unknown. They made their early money in cloth under the wool guild, the Arte della Lana, trading especially with France and Spain in the early fourteenth century, yet they still lagged behind families such as the Albizzi and Strozzi. Salvestro de' Medici spoke for the woolmakers' guild during the Ciompi revolt of 1378 to 1382, Antonio was exiled in 1396, and a plot in 1400 got almost every branch barred from Florentine politics for twenty years.
Timing helped. Siena had been Italy's banking capital until the Bonsignori family collapsed in 1298, and Florence inherited that role. The Medici Bank, founded in 1397 and lasting until 1494, became the largest in fifteenth-century Europe, and for a time the family was reckoned the richest on the continent. It was also an early adopter of double-entry bookkeeping. Cosimo and his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent turned that fortune into control of the republic while formally remaining private citizens.
Their spending shaped the Renaissance. They helped pay for St Peter's Basilica and Florence Cathedral and backed Donatello, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli and Galileo. They funded the invention of the piano and arguably of opera, and later championed the Counter-Reformation.
Citizens became princes in 1532 with the hereditary title Duke of Florence, raised in 1569 to Grand Duke of Tuscany after the state expanded under Cosimo I. The family also produced four popes, Leo X, Clement VII, Pius IV and Leo XI, and two queens of France, Catherine and Marie. The early grand dukes presided over growth, but the treasury was empty by the reign of Cosimo III, and the line ended when Gian Gastone died in 1737.
Source: House of Medici
