LA FORTUNE DES MÉDICIS

The history of one of the most fascinating families of the Italian Quattrocento.

The so-called “Medici” century was a time of exception, political balance and esthetic perfection. Artists, architects, scholars and philosophers flocked to Florence, in this brilliant Quattrocento, making it the beacon of the Italian Renaissance. But nothing would have been possible without the economic web woven patiently for decades by little-known Medicis, bankers who, with infinite caution and despite the serious upheavals in the city's history, set up a network of branches around the Tavola in Florence that made the family's fortune.
This book shows how the Medicis, supported by this solid infrastructure, managed to seize, under Cosimo (1434-1464) and Lorenzo “the Magnificent” (1469-1492), real political power in this complicated “republic” and to consolidate this power by establishing a court of high culture, a showcase for the clan's exceptional merits. This was before the system revealed its limits. By overstretching the resources of the Medici bank, Lorenzo and his successors drove it to its final failure, the bankruptcy of 1494.

JEAN-YVES BORIAUD, Professor Emeritus of Latin language and literature at the University of Nantes and a specialist in Renaissance Rome, has published Histoire de Rome (History of Rome) and Les Borgia (The Borgias), both with Perrin. He has translated major humanist texts, including Petrarch's Letters of Old Age, and Machiavelli's The Prince and The Art of War. In 2015, he received the Provins Moyen Age prize for his biography of Machiavelli.