Sharing the Medici Archive with the World.

What is MAP and what are the Medici Archives on which it focuses?

The Medici Archive Project (MAP) was founded in the early 1990s to promote the vast wealth of the Mediceo del  Principato, the epistolary collection of the Medici Grand Dukes (1532-1743) housed at the Archivio di Stato in Florence.  Comprising more than five million letters, this archival corpus is as much a global archive as it is a local and personal one. Roughly two-thirds of these letters were penned by an extensive network of Medici diplomats and informants, chronicling the political and cultural  developments in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Other letters document the mechanisms that connected the Medici court with its administrative capillaries, including the legislative, judicial, financial, and public health branches of government. At the same time, this collection also records the more personal dimension of the Medici themselves, as well as the cultural and artistic events that took place at their court.