Highlights from the Mediceo del Principato

Mark Rosen
January 24, 2008

Renaissance Florence was built around trade, and trade requires efficient and reliable banks. Banking relies on speculation on probable outcomes.

Lisa Kaborycha
January 10, 2008

Francesco de’ Medici at the imperial court in Vienna
In 1565, Cosimo I de’Medici sent his son Francesco across the Alps on a very important mission: to meet his 17-year-old bride, Johanna of Austria. This marriage was crucial to Cosimo’s dynastic strategy, lending the Medici family the patina of nobility it needed to enter the ranks of royalty.

Sheila Barker
December 13, 2007

Though the majority of the Medici Archives are filled with records of day-to-day communication in a large bureaucracy, there are several entertaining reports from agents and observers from the political power centres of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century western Europe. So much detailed information was sent from cities such as Rome, Milan, Madrid, Antwerp and London on a regular basis that accounts were written in the form of an avviso, or hand-written news-sheet.

Stefano DallAglio
November 29, 2007

Renaissance Tuscany was notorious for its practical jokes and ‘robust’ physical humour. Examples of complicated deceptions designed to confuse, embarrass or bring someone down a notch or two can be found in the tales of Boccaccio, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and, of course, in the Medici Archives. Depending on whether a joke is experienced from the viewpoint of the practitioner, a bystander or the victim, the very same action can be interpreted as a jolly good wheeze, bullying, or humiliation that verges on torture.