MEDICI FAMILY

French Mdicis, Italian bourgeois family that ruled Florence and, later, Tuscany, during most of the period from 1434 to 1737, except for two brief intervals (from 1494 to 1512 and from 1527 to 1530). It provided the church with four popes (Leo X, Clement VII, Pius IV, and Leon XI) and married into the royal families of Europe (most notably in France, in the persons of queens Catherine de Mdicis and Marie de Mdicis). Three lines of Medici successively approached or acquired positions of power (see the Table). The line of Chiarissimo II failed to gain power in Florence in the 14th century. In the 15th century the line of Cosimo the Elder set up a hereditary principate in Florence but without legal right or title, hence subject to sudden overthrow; crowns burgeoned, however, on the last branches of their genealogical tree, for two of them were dukes outside Florence, their last heir in a direct line became queen of France (Catherine de Mdicis), and their final offspring, Alessandro, a bastard, was duke of Florence. In the 16th century a third line renounced republican notions and imposed its tyranny, and its members made themselves a dynasty of grand dukes of Tuscany. The differences between these three collateral lines are due essentially to circumstances, for there was, in all the Medici, an extraordinary persistence of hereditary traits. In the first place, not being soldiers, they were constantly confronting their adversaries with bribes of gold rather than with battalions of armed men. In addition, the early Medici resolutely courted favour with the middle and poorer classes in the city, and this determination to be popolani (plebeian) endured a long time after them. Finally, all were consumed by a passion for arts and letters and for building. They were more than beneficent and ostentatious patrons of the arts; they were also enlightened and were probably the most magnificent such patrons that the West has ever seen. Additional reading Among many historians and memorialists contemporary with the Medici, Niccol Machiavelli, Francesco Guicciardini, and, to a lesser degree, Scipione Ammirato cannot be dispensed with. Modern works, for a general view, include G.F. Young, The Medici, 2 vol. (1909, reprinted 1933; Italian trans. 1935; French trans. 1969), dated but still useful; Albert Jourcin, Les Mdicis (1968; German trans. 1969); Gaetano Pieraccini, La stirpe de' Medici di Cafaggiolo, 2nd ed., 3 vol. (1947), extensive researches on the hereditary features and diseases that run in the Medici family; and Marcel Brion, Le Sicle des Mdicis (1969; The Medici: A Great Florentine Family, 1969). On institutions and banking, Nicolai Rubinstein, The Government of Florence Under the Medici, 1434 to 1494 (1966), based on a masterly examination of the Florentine archives, is fundamental; while Raymond de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 13971494 (1963), excellently clears up a difficult matter.