Florence's gold florin once financed kings, popes, and wars
Late medieval Florentine bankers backed English kings in the Hundred Years' War and underwrote papal projects from Avignon to Renaissance Rome. Many scholars call the Arno city the birthplace of the Renaissance, and its dialect underwrote standard Italian through Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio.
Romans founded Florentia in fifty-nine BC as a veteran colony on the Via Cassia in the Arno valley, the name meaning flourishing town. After Ostrogoth and Byzantine turmoil shrank the population toward one thousand, Lombard peace and Charlemagne's conquest in seven seventy-four restored growth. By about thirteen twenty-five the city may have held one hundred twenty thousand people before the Black Death of thirteen forty-eight cut that by more than half. Wool supported some twenty-five thousand workers; the Ciompi wool-comber rising of thirteen seventy-eight briefly challenged oligarchic rule.
Cosimo de' Medici built quiet control through patronage and papal banking; his grandson Lorenzo, ruling from fourteen sixty-nine, earned the title Magnificent as patron to Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Botticelli. Medici kin became popes Leo X and Clement VII, French queens Catherine and Marie, and from fifteen sixty-nine Grand Dukes of Tuscany until Gian Gastone died in seventeen thirty-seven. Between eighteen sixty-five and eighteen seventy-one Florence even served as capital of the new Kingdom of Italy. UNESCO listed the historic centre in nineteen eighty-two.
As of twenty twenty-six the comune counts about three hundred sixty-one thousand six hundred twenty-five residents, eighth in Italy, with roughly nine hundred eighty-eight thousand in the metropolitan province. About two hundred seventy-five kilometres northwest of Rome, the city still draws millions to the Uffizi, Palazzo Pitti, and a skyline of Renaissance monuments Forbes ranked among the world's most beautiful in twenty ten. From garrison camp to Medici stage, Florence turned local money and language into European templates.
Source: Florence
